Fine-scale spatial and temporal plankton distributions in the Southern California Bight: lessons from in situ microscopes and broadband echosounder

Phytoplankton and zooplankton are important components of marine ecosystems, and play a major role in the biological pump, affecting carbon transport in the global oceans. Their dynamic heterogeneous spatial and temporal distributions require special tools for observing them at the ecological scales relevant to the individual organisms. In this work, I used optic and acoustic methods to study plankton organisms at spatial scales of meters and temporal scales ranging from minutes to months. Using two in situ microscopes I described the fine-scale vertical distribution of phytoplankton and several zooplankton taxa in a coastal location in the Southern California Bight. Highly resolved spatial observations revealed cryptic maxima of fluorescent particles not observed with traditional fluorometers. Furthermore, this high sampling resolution revealed that water density, and not depth, regulated the vertical position, and interactions between observed phytoplankton and zooplankton distributions. Underwater acoustic echosounders can be powerful tools to observe in situ plankton distributions. Interpreting the acoustic echoes, however, requires highly calibrated instruments and ground-truthing experiments to identify the source of acoustic signals. This work presents the description of a novel combination of a broadband, high-frequency (1.5-2.5 MHz) echosounder and a stereoscopic camera --combined, these systems can localize the echo produced by an individual target while simultaneously providing visual identification of the target. This work has provided one of the first comparisons of in situ measured broadband target strength (BTS) and the expected signal using a physical model. The results of this experiment revealed unexpected, important differences between measured and modeled BTS. This system was also used to make in situ observations of individual fragile gelatinous organisms, marine snow particles and phytoplankton, providing evidence of their significant acoustic reflectivity. Finally, using a moored in situ microscope (Scripps Plankton Camera) similar in design to the O-Cam helped identifying a parasite-host interaction over a period of a few months. This is the first reported observation of Paradinium poucheti parasitizing Oithona similis in the North Pacific Ocean. The short time-series revealed that the prevalence of this parasite is higher than previously observed in other ocean basins.