Trophic Structure 2: Components and Controls in Water Column Food Webs

Abstract

No topic within marine ecology and biological oceanography has changed more in the last decade than our notions about components and structure of planktonic food webs. Knowledge about marine water column food webs has been considerably enlarged, and made much more complex, by recent findings about the existence and role of smaller organisms, release and reuse of dissolved organic matter, and reassessment of the function of certain larger organisms. The changes in our understanding have been significant enough (Pomeroy, 1974) to amount to a new “paradigm”, a signal advance in understanding (Kuhn, 1970).