Zooplankton Ecology Lab

This study is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Christian Reiss of the NOAA Antarctic Marine Living Resources (AMLR) program. We participated in the final two, of a series of five, AMLR winter krill surveys in August of 2015 and 2016, to the northern Antarctic Peninsula. During both cruises, we collected krill samples to measure grazing rates (using gut fluorescence analysis) and in August 2016, we conducted respiration rate experiments to determine energetic requirements of krill in the winter. There is still much debate about how Antarctic krill survive during the wintertime, when food availability is very low. Recent studies show that krill have different overwintering strategies in different parts of Antarctica. Our study will help to broaden what we know about these strategies.