September 22, 2023 13:04 to September 25, 2023 17:30
Head Quarters, Goa
online
Title of Talk: Making sense of plankton: What we know and don't know about pelagic ecosystems, Part 1 The phytoplankton perspective; Part 2 The zooplankton perspective
Speaker: Prof. Victor Smetacek,
Bio-Oceanography
Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz
Centre for Polar and Marine Research,
Bremerhaven, Germany
Date &Time; Monday 25th September 2023, 1600 hrs
Venue: Online
Abstract:
Plankton is under scientific scrutiny since well over a century, yet consensus on many matters pertaining to the factors shaping structure and functioning of pelagic ecosystems is far from being reached. This is partly because bio-oceanography is fragmented into subdisciplines, where each wants to be equally important, but also within the disciplines, attention keeps moving from subject to subject without a clear sense of progression. But the main reason we are groping in the dark is because pelagic ecosystems are inaccessible to us the way terrestrial ecosystems are: we cannot see them functioning, but, by putting the parts together, we can imagine how evolution has brought them where they are today. I argue that organism interactions in the arms race, in particular co-evolution between predators (zooplankton) and prey (phytoplankton), play a central role in driving evolution in the pelagic realm. Understanding the evolutionary forces shaping ocean biota is a prerequisite for harnessing plankton for human purposes but also for protecting the oceanic ecosystems currently under severe stress from anthropogenic pressures.