MB5055:03
Biological Oceanography
| Townsville | HECS Band 2 |
26 hours lectures, 39 hours practicals. Semester 1.
Available to GDipResMeth, GCertResMeth, GDipSc, MAppSc and MSc students.
Staff: Professor M Kingsford.
An examination of the plankton community and its interactions with the physical and chemical environment. Topics include: nutrients and productivity, zooplankton behaviour and life cycles and the distributions of planktonic species over space and time on a broad range of scales. Students will be required to attend lectures and practical classes in MB3050 .
Learning Objectives:
- give the student a new conceptual understanding of the ocean as a fabric of living organisms, rather than as a mere water mass;
- provide a practical familiarity with the techniques of plankton sampling, identification and analysis;
- impress upon the student the fundamental significance of the plankton as the foundation of the economy of the sea and the nursery for most of its species;
- give a sense of the complex structure of the planktonic community over the full scale of variation across space, time and body size.
Assessment by project (30%); laboratory reports (20%); examination (50%).