The adventures of Fred the copepod

During the next days I will be posting something very different, a child’s story. The project intents to reach the youngest audience with a story about a copepod named Fred that explains, in an educational and entertaining way, what copepods are, what they do in the sea, and the problems he experiences during his life.

Microplankton and Metazooplankton from the Catalan Coast, December 15th, 2022

In these 3 videos you will find a summary of the most relevant findings from PUDEM sampling in front Barcelona. The community was rather surprising, because it seemed an end of summer one, with cladocera (Penilia avirostris and Evadne spp.) and Oithona spp. combined with a diatom bloom of very large and diverse species. I

The fragility of plankton

When there is a natural disaster at sea, such as the Exxon Valdez in Alaska (1989) or the Prestige in the NW Spanish coast (2002), we all immediately worry about seabirds, turtles, and dolphins and how the disaster will affect fisheries. On television, we are flooded with images of black birds, covered in oil, and

Our copepod cultures

Today I will present you our copepod cultures. Some of them have been decades with us. The nauplii of the three species are also different: These are a nauplii of Oithona davisae. They are usually pointy towards the end and have two spines in the posterior part that are almost touching by the end. Paracartia

Plankton and art

Those who have seen a plankton sample cannot deny its inherent beauty. From the perfect symmetry of diatoms to the complexity of some radiolarians, we can find an infinite range of shapes and colors that have been a source of inspiration for many artists, ancient and modern. Perhaps we find the maximum expression of the representation

Microplankton sample, 11/20/2022

I leave you with a selection of pictures from the last plankton sample (2 Km offshore Barcelona, 5 meters depth, November 20, 2022). You can find the movies here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0KFxcoq_9A for a summary of the relevant species https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYfxSVCLrC4 for Acantharia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dNyRKlIk4g for a beautiful Amoeba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRdBe37iO50 for Ceratium spp.

A brief history of plankton discovery

In this post, I will give you a few glimpses of how were the early plankton-human interactions and how we managed to study these creatures. As you will see, there was already evidence from ancient Greece that there were strange beings, including plankton organisms, that did not fit into any known classification. However,perhaps the greatest work was

Marine Zooplankton Ecology Group Youtube Channel

In the following link, you will find our Zooplankton Ecology Group Youtube Channel. It has many videos of the different organisms we found in our samples, including metazoans and protozoans. You also will find a video on how to make your home-made plankton net. I leave you a few links to the newest and the

The ciliate that met a diatom: a case of symbiosis in plankton

Sometimes, very different organisms get together and form a successful consortium. Lichens, for instance are a symbiotic consortium between and algae and a fungus. In the plankton we have similar relationships. For instance, a ciliate and an alga, once in a while stop being grazer and prey and work together for a better success. This

The marine food web

Here you have a marine food web graphic representation using some of my drawings. Feel free to use it for teaching, although I would ask to mention the source and authorship. The little blurry dots represent virus and bacteria. Given they feed at all levels of the food web I positioned them all around. I