Dietary plasticity in small Arctic copepods as revealed with prey metabarcoding.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Small copepods (<2 mm) compose an important constituent of the Arctic marine food web, but their trophic interactions remain largely unexplored, partly due to methodological limitations.

Methods

We here characterize the prey of the abundant cyclopoid Oithona similis, harpacticoid Microsetella norvegica and calanoid Microcalanus spp. from the Arctic Barents Sea and Nansen Basin during four seasons using brute force prey metabarcoding of the 18S rRNA gene.

Key findings

Chaetognaths were unexpectedly the most consistently identified taxa and composed 47% of all prey reads. Some taxa were seasonally important, including diatoms in April-May (43%), dinoflagellates in December (15%) and March (17%), and urochordates in August (20%). Compositi

SUBMITTER: Flo S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11443965 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep-Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature