Vertiquant: A Device for Automatically Recording Vertical Migration of Plankton

Abstract

Vertical migration is a key subject in understanding zooplankton ecology and its influence on aquatic ecosystems. This paper introduces a device for automatically recording vertical plankton migrations to study proximate factors regulating the stimulus, timing and amplitude of these movements under controlled laboratory conditions. The instrument records the light scattered by organisms at their respective depths and processes the signals in real time to a graphic representation of the organisms vertical distribution. Organisms of different taxa from a size of <40 μ, to > 10 000 μm were used for these experiments. Daphnia migrations in response to UV light are used to demonstrate the basic functions of the instrument.