The main goal of our project is to understand the patterns of diversity and biogeography in marine copepods. To achieve this goal, we developed a unique modeling framework to simulate the trade-offs between growth, development, and fecundity in marine copepods.
We developed a new approach to modeling growth and development in metazoans. We applied this approach to marine copepods, and used it to understand relationships between copepod body size and temperature, copepod biodiversity patterns, and copepod biogeography. This project also provided support for experiments to look at how copepod body size impacts the particle size spectrum.
We used our model to explain why marine copepods and other organisms with strong associations between body size and temperature should be expected to deviate from the temperature-diversity relationship that emerges from classic metabolic theory. We also used a novel emergent modeling approach to explore how temperature and chlorophyll cycles influence copepod biogeography
