Introduction to Meiofauna Part 4

For this week, I asked social media for suggestions on which meiofauna taxa I should introduce, and I received a great recommendation from the first professor I got to do marine work with, Dr. Bosch from SUNY Geneseo. Dr. Bosch studies marine larvae, and has done some awesome work with sea stars that you should look up, but for this week he hoped to see a blog post on copepods.

Copepods are one of the more well-known taxa of meiofauna because of their importance as a prey item. Copepods are small crustaceans that are fed upon by fish larvae and important planktivores, like anchovies. Planktivores are important food sources for larger fish, such as tuna and sharks, so the abundance of copepods in the ocean influences the abundance of small fish and their large predators. 












​Copepods are interesting morphologically, because at first glance they may remind you of an insect, like a wasp. They are clear in color, as you can see in the image above, which is similar to meiofauna; the clear coloration can help the organisms hide from predators between sediment grains. I have a soft spot for copepods because my first task at the marine lab was to sort through sediment samples and pick out copepods to send off for identification by another scientist. Image looking at sediment grains on a petri dish under a microscope and then having to scoop up a tiny animal on the head of a pin, because that's what the sorting process is like. The lab work that I did is some of the work that is published in Stark et al. (2020) on the the diversity, abundance, and anthropogenic impacts on nematode and copepods in Antarctica.

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