Towards a correct description of zooplankton feeding in models: Taking into account food-mediated unsynchronized vertical migration

Complex nature of foraging behaviour of zooplankton makes it difficult to describe adequately zooplankton grazing in models with vertical space. In mean-field models (based on systems of PDEs or coupled ODEs), zooplankton feeding at a given depth is normally computed as the product of the local functional response and the zooplankton density at this depth. Such simplification is often at odds with field observations which show the absence of clear relationship between intake rates of organisms and the ambient food density. The observed discrepancy is generic and is often caused by fast non-synchronous vertical migration of organisms with different nutrition status. In this paper, we suggest a simple way of incorporating unsynchronized short-term vertical migration of zooplankton into the mean-field modelling framework. We compute grazing of zooplankton in each layer depending on feeding activity of organisms in the layer. We take into account grazing impact of animals which are in the active phase of foraging cycle at the given moment of time but neglect the impact of animals which are in the non-active phase of the cycle (e.g. digesting food). Unsynchronized vertical migration determines the vertical distribution of actively feeding animals in layers depending on vertical distribution of food. In this paper, we compare two generic plankton models: (i) a model based on ‘classical’ grazing approach and (ii) a model incorporating food-mediated unsynchronized vertical migration of zooplankton. We show that including unsynchronized food-mediated migration would make the behaviour of a plankton model more realistic. This would imply a significant enhancement of ecosystem's stability and some additional mechanisms of regulation of algal blooms. In the system with food-mediated unsynchronized vertical migration, the control of phytoplankton by herbivorous becomes possible even for very large concentrations of nutrients in the water (formally, when the system's carrying capacity tends to infinity).