Offerings
View how MB3050 is offered in 2004
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MB3050:03

Biological Oceanography

Townsville

HECS Band 2

26 hours lectures, 13 hours seminars, 26 hours practicals, 8 hours field work. Semester 1.

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 distribution of planktonic species over space and time on a broad range of scales and factors influencing the survival of larval fish.

Learning Objectives:

to give the student a new conceptual understanding of the ocean as a fabric of living organisms, rather than as a mere water mass;

to provide a practical familiarity with the techniques of plankton sampling, identification and analysis;

to 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;

to 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 examination (60%); laboratory report (20%); tutorial assignment (20%).