In the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures acting on the Earth system, urgent actions are needed to guarantee efficient resource management and sustainable development for our growing human population. Our oceans - the largest underexplored component of the Earth system - are potentially home for a large number of new resources, which can directly impact upon food security and the wellbeing of humanity. However, the extraction of these resources has repercussions for biodiversity and the oceans ability to sequester green house gases and thereby climate. In the search for “new resources” to unlock the economic potential of the global oceans, recent observations have identified a large unexploited biomass of mesopelagic fish living in the deep ocean. This biomass has recently been estimated to be 10 billion metric tonnes, 10 times larger than previous estimates however the real biomass is still in question. If we are able to exploit this community at sustainable levels without impacting upon biodiversity and compromising the oceans’ ability to sequester carbon, we can produce more food and potentially many new nutraceutical products. However, to meet the needs of present generations without compromising the needs of future generations, we need to guarantee a sustainable exploitation of these resources. To do so requires a holistic assessment of the community and an understanding of the mechanisms controlling this biomass, its role in the preservation of biodiversity and its influence on climate as well as management tools able to weigh the costs and benefits of exploitation of this community.

Long distance migration occurs in a wide variety of taxa including birds, insects, fishes, mammals and reptiles. Here, we provide evidence for a new paradigm for the determinants of migration destination. As adults, sea turtles show fidelity to their natal nesting areas and then at the end of the breeding season may migrate to distant foraging sites. For a major rookery in the Mediterranean, we simulated hatchling drift by releasing 288 000 numerical particles in an area close to the nesting beaches. We show that the pattern of adult dispersion from the breeding area reflects the extent of passive dispersion that would be experienced by hatchlings. Hence, the prevailing oceanography around nesting areas may be crucial to the selection of foraging sites used by adult sea turtles. This environmental forcing may allow the rapid evolution of new migration destinations if ocean currents alter with climate change.

Turbulence impacts zooplankton fitness in opposing manners, by increasing contacts with prey but at the same time increasing contacts with predators. We investigate the fitness of individual zooplankton in terms of a trade-off between energetic gains and costs, and risk of predation. Through idealized descriptions of foraging and predation in a turbulent water column, we determine how fast a zooplankter should swim, if at all, and where should it position itself in the vertical to maximize its fitness given certain environmental conditions. Suspension feeding has an advantage over ambush feeding at high turbulence levels, whereas cruise feeding becomes optimal at low turbulence levels. In general, behaviours that seek out low levels of turbulence increase an individual's fitness, a prediction that runs counter to turbulent encounter rate arguments, and exposes the fallacy of examining only the foraging aspects of the fitness trade-off.

The ecological succession of phytoplankton communities in temperate seas is characterized by the dominance of nonmotile diatoms during spring and motile flagellates during summer, a pattern often linked to the seasonal variation in the physical environment and nutrient availability. We focus on the effects of adaptive zooplankton grazing behavior on the seasonal succession of temperate plankton communities in an idealized community model consisting of a zooplankton grazer and two phytoplankton species, one motile and the other nonmotile. The grazer can switch between ambush feeding on motile cells or feeding‐current feeding on nonmotile cells. The feeding‐current behavior imposes an additional mortality risk on the grazer, whereas ambush feeding benefits from small‐scale fluid turbulence. Grazer‐phytoplankton feeding interactions are forced by light and turbulence and the grazer adopts the feeding behavior that optimizes its fitness. The adaptive grazing model predicts essential features of the seasonal plankton succession reported from temperate seas, including the vertical distribution and seasonal variation in the relative abundance of motile and nonmotile phytoplankton and the seasonal variation in grazer abundance. Adaptive grazing behavior, in addition to nutrient and mixing regimes, can promote characteristic changes in the seasonal structure of phytoplankton community observed in nature.