DISCOVERY-FLEXICON: FLEXIbility and CONstraints in life histories

FLEXICON is investigating the life-cycles of some of the world''s most durable and abundant organisms that are vital to the Earth''s systems. Marine organism in the Southern Ocean must endure one of the most extreme environments on the planet, with sea-temperatures often below freezing and summers that sometimes last just a few weeks. They must also adapt to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world''s strongest ocean current, as well as an ice sheet that can expand and contract hundreds of kilometres each day. Despite this, some of largest biomasses and abundances of organisms occur there and their high productivity makes the Southern Ocean an important carbon sink, crucial to the regulation of the Earth''s climate. FLEXICON seeks to understand what characteristics make Southern Ocean organisms succeed or fail in this extreme and variable environment. In particular, it is examining the flexibility and constraints in the physiology and behaviour of organisms that allow them to complete their life-cycles successfully. Key to its approach is the identification of CRITICAL STAGES, those stages that are particularly vulnerable to environmental change. Measuring the response of these stages to potential extremes helps us understand how these species may respond to any future climatic shifts. FLEXICON will examine key species at all trophic levels, from copepods and krill, through mesopelagic and commercial fish, to albatrosses, penguins and seals. Its approach will be firstly, to build models of the life-cycles of key organisms through using best available information in databases and publications. These models will then help in the design of field campaigns that will measure important missing parameters and provide data for testing model predictions. The final refined models will have the capacity to predict the response of key species to future environmental scenarios, such as changes to ice-extent, sea-temperature, primary productivity and food availability. FLEXICON is a core part of the DISCOV
ERY 2010 programme and intimately linked with the other DISCOVERY 2010 projects. It will provide FOODWEBS with base-line parameters, such as the timing and extent of the seasonality in the abundances of key species. CEMI will use FLEXICON''s parameterisation of the krill life-cycle in its circumpolar distributional models. The improved understanding of the life-cycles of commercially exploited species, such as krill, mackerel icefish and Patagonian toothfish will be important inputs into the OEM project. FLEXICON will generate information that will be useful to other BAS core programmes, such as BIOFLAME (krill genetics) and COMPLEXITY (foraging and swarming behaviours). It will also be an intellectual- and data-provider to international bodies such as CCAMLR, EUROCEANS, ICED, GLOBEC/IMBER and IPY.