MODELLING DISPERSAL AND CONNECTIVITY OF ANTARCTIC KRILL IN THE LAZAREV SEA AND ADJACENT SEAS

Date

2025-9-1

Author

Çağdaş, Bulut

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The zooplankton species Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, is a key organism in the Southern Ocean ecosystem that is recognized as a main component of the Antarctic marine food web. Antarctic krill is distributed all around Antarctica predominantly south of the Polar Front, including the Lazarev Sea the focus of this study. In this study a complex modeling system consisting of output from the global, coupled physical-biochemical model FESOM-REcoM2 and a Lagrangian Particle Tracking model is used to simulate the connectivity of the Lazarev Sea krill population with populations from surrounding seas. The survival and growth of different krill developmental stages along transport paths are simulated extracting food concentrations from the coupled model as inputs to an Individual Based Model of krill. Simulations show that Lazarev Sea krill may be supplied largely by krill from the Riiser-Larsen Sea (60%) while 39% of the population may be retained to recruit to the local Lazarev Sea population. Further, connectivity of krill originating in the Lazarev Sea with different regions in the Weddell Sea and the transport into the ACC is shown, as well as retention areas located in the southeastern Lazarev Sea and near Maud Rise. Krill growth simulations show the importance of sea ice algae as a food source for larval growth, the effect of spatial and seasonal variances on survival and growth. The study shows the interconnectivity of the Lazarev Sea with adjacent seas of the Southern Ocean but at the same time points to a high potential for part of the population being self-recruiting.

Subject Keywords

Antarctic krill, Lazarev Sea, Lagrangian Particle Transport, Connectivity, Numerical modeling

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/117408

Collections

Graduate School of Marine Sciences, Thesis