Abstract
This paper reviews the author's research on metabolic activities of marine zooplankton for which the Okada Prize of the Oceanographical Society of Japan was awarded in 1978. The term metabolic activities used here refers to various physiological rate processes of zooplankton, such as respiration, excretion, feeding and growth.
On the basis of experimental data obtained by the author and other workers, it is emphasized that all these rates are power functions of the body weight of zooplankton. In other words, the weight specific rates (rates per unit body weight) increase with a decrease in body weight. The habitat temperature of zooplankton can also affect the level of these rates.
The relationship between these rates and body weight established experimentally can be applied to the estimation of the total rates of a zooplankton community in the field, by knowing the size distribution of individual zooplankters. The feasibility of this method was tested with the zooplankton community in the Kuroshio region.
Finally, the potential importance of microzooplankton in total zooplankton respiration was suggested, based on respiration rate data recently obtained in the author's laboratory.
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Ikeda, T. The study of metabolic activities of marine zooplankton, with particular emphasis on the relationship to body size. Journal of the Oceanographical Society of Japan 34, 173–180 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02108655
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02108655