An ecological study of a marine plankton community based on the field data collected from Bay of Bengal

Abstract

Effect of environmental factors and existence of harmful species in a community play an important role in generating hypothesis about the nature of interactions between species in an assemblage. The present paper attempts to establish the role of different hydrological parameters in the formation of plankton blooms and to look for a suitable form of functional response to describe the reduction of zooplankton population due to toxin producing phytoplankton (TPP). We consider the analysis of variance technique in regression model. In the analysis, first we try to check whether each of the zooplankton species has significant association with any of the physical parameters and TPP as a whole. Secondly, we consider the fact whether each of the zooplankton species has any association with the physical parameters and the TPP individually. Moreover, we propose a modified variance measure for detecting species association, taking into consideration some of the environmental variables and suggested a suitable functional form to describe the toxin production process by TPP population. We then incorporate our findings into a mathematical model and show that a sufficiently large increase in the toxin production rate can destabilize the plankton system's functioning and result in algae bloom.