Development of acoustic vertical zooplankton profiling system

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A equipment and theory of vertical zooplankton profiling system were developed. This system can observe abundance of zooplankton distributed vertically 150 m depth and horizontally 2-3 km using acoustic scattering intensity with 1 hour interval.The system was deployed in the lee of a island to confirm the ability of the system through a estimation of biological productivity in a eddy produced by the island and the Kuroshio. As the results, the system observed that zooplankton abundance gradually increased and suggested that its term well agreed with appearing periods of the eddy theoretically. This is a first time to be able to observe fluctuations of zooplankton with such small time-scale interval quantitatively. Therefore, this observing system using sound seems to be useful to describe interactions between primary production and secondary production in the ocean. Using this system, biological fluctuation in the ocean will be observed with the same time-scale as physical fluctuation and studies on the biological change associated with environmental change is expected to be well advanced.