"Observing and quantifying the foraging behavior of individual zooplankton in situ and in silico"
Dr. James Pierson
UMCES Horn Point Laboratory
**CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER**
**WILL BE RESCHEDULED IN FALL 2009**
Monday, March 2, 2009
3:30 PM
Room 3200, Research Innovations Building I
Abstract
Observations of zooplankton vertical migration are usually made using samples from net tows that show the
distribution of the population at a given point in time, but offer no information on the condition or behavior of those
individuals. We developed a numerical model and zooplankton trapping equipment to test the hypothesis that zooplankton
make repeated nighttime "forays" into the food-rich surface water from the food-poor layer immediately below. Both our
field observations and model results suggest that this behavior occurs, and that it may confer a significant fitness advantage
to those individuals who do it.
Biography
Dr. Pierson is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Horn Point Laboratory, which is part of the University of Maryland
Center for Environmental Science. He works with Dr. Mike Roman on a number of projects including a study to explore
trophic interactions in the estuarine turbidity maximum of the Chesapeake Bay. In 2006, he received his Ph.D. in
oceanography at the University of Washington, where his work was on the trophic interactions of copepods and diatoms
in the sea. Before entering graduate school, Dr. Pierson worked at the University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of
Oceanography, where he was a research scientist on the GLOBEC Georges Bank Project and participated in numerous
broad-scale surveys of the bank. He received his B.S. in biology at the University of New Hampshire, and grew up in central
New Jersey.
Reception before seminar at 3:00 PM
Research Innovations Building I
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA 23529
757-683-5548
Last updated 2/02/2009.
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