Zooplankton Community Structure Across Four Maine Estuaries

Primary consumers, such as zooplankton, drive energy transfer up marine food webs to secondary and tertiary consumers, which includes many species of commercial value including American Lobster (Homarus americanus ) and Atlantic Cod (Gadusmorhua).Despite their importance as indicator species, a comprehensive understanding of zooplankton community variation across Maine’s estuaries is lacking. More specifically, the competitive interaction between zooplankton and bivalves feeding on phytoplankton remains unexplored. In this project, we compared zooplankton composition and diversity among several estuaries in coastal Maine. Our research contributes to the understanding of how basal trophic levels are affected by conditions such as existing aquaculture activity and provides essential baseline information on nearshore prey. Our work presents a geospatially and temporally referenced visualization of heterotrophic plankton biodiversity as a benchmark for changing conditions in the Gulf of Maine