Exploring the food chain in the equatorial tropical Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean hosts one of the most lucrative wild fisheries on earth: tuna. Despite its $40B annual price tag, our understanding of the biology of tunas is surprisingly sparse in their larval stage, and especially in their locale of highest abundance - the remote, uninhabited, equatorial Pacific Ocean. We know very little about the critical dynamics of tuna larval biology; and we know even less about how these larval tuna interact with the plankton communities they are constantly (and perhaps inadvertently) surrounded by. This project will investigate invertebrate zooplankton assemblages across time, space, and oceanographic conditions. This project is part of a decade-long time series, with samples collected onboard vessels via the Sea Education Association. Students who work on this project start off sorting plankton under a stereomicroscope, learning larval plankton identification skills and becoming an expert ocean taxonomist. We look at larval tuna, and also an accompanying suite of other larval fish species, invertebrates, and oceanographic data to try to understand plankton communities in this remote, understudied region. Students who excel in this project will have the ability to advance towards an honors thesis in the lab.