Introducing yourself, what your major is, and what you will be presenting about.

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Hello, my name is Amanda Kent, and I am a 2nd year undergraduate student studying ocean science. Today I will be presenting:

Krill: A Tiny Crustacean with a Major Impact to Oregon Ecosystems

• What am I addressing? 
• What is the background?
• What is my objective and what am I hoping to learn from this?

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I'm going to introduce an important type of marine animal called zooplankton and explain a small amount of the impact they have on some of the animals living in our marine ecosystem. Zooplankton are very small animals that drift within the currents of our oceans. They feed exclusively on microscopic plants found at the surface called phytoplankton and they are a main food source for the majority of the ocean's food web. I'll be talking about two particular species of a zooplankton called krill, specifically, Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera, which predominantly live in the Pacific Ocean and Bering sea. For my URSA project, I wanted to better understand the value of krill directly to baleen whales living off of the Oregon coast. Why are these tiny creatures so important to these ginormous mammals and how does this affect us?

• How did I conduct my research?
• What did I specifically focus on?

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In order to truly understand these two species and their impact on whales living in the coastal Oregon ecosystem, I needed to look at them through a historical point of view. I dove through over a half-century of krill academic research papers written on topics ranging from carbon sequestration, foraging ecology of whales, all the way to the ecosystem services of the Pacific Ocean. As I collected these papers, I went through each of them and pulled out specifics that I was looking for. These are a few of the papers where I found the most useful data.

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As I mentioned before, Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera are a very important food source in the Pacific Ocean. Animals ranging from seabirds, salmon, hake, sardines, and our topic today, whales, eat them. These whales are the blue whale, the fin whale and the humpback whale, all from the Baleen family. Instead of teeth, these whales have baleen plates, which act as a filter feeding system. This allows the whales to ingest tons of water filled with krill and push the water back out leaving the krill behind

• What did my data tell me?
• How are my results interpreted?

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Although krill are incredibly small, they actually aggregate in large quantities to avoid predators. Krill spend their days in deeper depths of the oceans and come up to feed at night through a process called diel vertical migration. This means that whales would also need energy to dive deep enough to get them. So, we want to know, how much exactly are they eating to keep up their energy to dive for and follow krill distributions as they migrate through the California current? After finding a few key papers and mining data from those, we calculated how much krill these whales could be eating. Between blue whales and fin whales, we saw potential estimates of billions of individual krill being consumed per day.

Slide 6: Why does this matter?

• What is the goal I am working towards?
• Are there limitations?

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Understanding why Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera are so important to whales helps us have a better understanding as to how valuable these creatures are and how crucial it is that they remain abundant in the ocean. Aside from being a major food source, krill also play a critical role in the oceans carbon cycle. As they graze on phytoplankton at the surface, they ingest CO2 and deposit it into the seafloor through their fecal pellets, or through animals that eat them, keeping CO2 from going back into the atmosphere. Shrinking krill populations would negatively impact the animals that rely on them, thus affecting marine ecosystems, the oceans carbon cycle and ocean services we use, such as the whale watching and the commercial fishing industries.

Slide 7: Conclusion and Implications

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The research I've done during my URSA project has exposed knowledge gaps that need to be addressed and we will be continuing with new sets of krill measurements this summer.