If you’ve ever been swimming along the shoreline, chances are, you probably have come across zooplankton. Most are microscopic, but some are visible to the naked eye, like jellyfish.
“These might be the copepods that you might know from SpongeBob [Squarepants], the evil Plankton character," said Cohen. "Or they might be things that spend only a portion of their life in the plankton [stage] and that might be like the larval stage of barnacles or crabs.”
Zooplankton play an important role in the marine food web. While they eat many of the smaller zooplankton, they are also eaten by many larger marine animals. Because of this, they act as a major barometer for the health of our oceans.
In the Delaware Bay, they’ve been rather understudied, according to Jonathan Cohen, marine science professor at University of Delaware. In fact, one of the last significant studies on zooplankton took place in the 1950s, by University of Delaware’s first female marine biologist, Joanne Daiber.
Part of the reason zooplankton haven't been well studied is because research on these organisms takes a lot of time and skill.
“Before, you collected zooplankton by towing nets through the water, bringing the sample collected by the net, you bring the sample back to the lab, you preserve it so the organisms aren’t moving around, and then you painstakingly under the microscope pick each individual apart, you identify it you might make measurements on it, and then you move on to the next individual in the sample," said Cohen.
Now, Cohen is using a new tool, called the ZooScan to catalog his zooplankton more efficiently. The Zooscan is similar to a desktop scanner that many of us have in our offices.
It’s able to save researchers time that it takes to pick out each organism so they can spend more time answering the bigger questions -- like how climate change and severe storms is affecting marine life in the Delaware Bay.
Cohen uses the Zooscan on a research cruise named after Daiber, the R/V Joanne Daiber.