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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Plankton Research Année : 2011

The legacy of the last cruise of the Carnegie: a lesson in the value of dusty old taxonomic monographs

John R. Dolan

Résumé

Large online databases contain a wealth of information from modern oceanographic campaigns. While efforts have been made to ``rescue'' data from the older literature, the assumption should not be made that all the good data that exist are online, waiting to be downloaded and analysed. Here, I show an example of what can be gleaned from the old literature. Three monographs from the last cruise of the Carnegie catalogued the species of the phytoplankton genus Ceratium, the tintinnid ciliates of the microzooplankton, and the copepod species of the zooplankton. The samples employed were from plankton net tows or a ``Pettersson plankton pump'' from 160 stations in the North and Central Atlantic, the Central, Southern and Northern Pacific. From each monograph, the species records were keyed into spreadsheets to allow station by station comparisons. Plotting species richness along the cruise track showed roughly parallel changes among the three groups with peaks and troughs corresponding with low and high latitudes. For Ceratium, tintinnid ciliates, and copepods, very similar latitudinal diversity gradients were evident after binning the species richness of each group into 58 bands of latitude. The data extracted from the reports of the last cruise of the Carnegie revealed close correspondence of diversity in planktonic organisms among the protists and metazoan taxa of distinct trophic levels. The group with the most widespread species was the copepods.

Domaines

Océanographie

Dates et versions

hal-03502019 , version 1 (24-12-2021)

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Citer

John R. Dolan. The legacy of the last cruise of the Carnegie: a lesson in the value of dusty old taxonomic monographs. Journal of Plankton Research, 2011, 33 (9), pp.1317-1324. ⟨10.1093/plankt/fbr060⟩. ⟨hal-03502019⟩
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