The presence of patches and layers in marine pelagic ecosystems may play an important role in providing food for higher trophic levels at concentrations high enough to support the metabolism, growth, and reproduction of the consumers. There has been a persistent enigma of average bulk water prey concentrations frequently being below that necessary for consumer growth, yet the consumer populations are observed to grow and persist (Lasker, 1975: Mullin, 1988). Concentrated patches or layers of prey organisms are not accurately sampled by traditional means such as net tows, bottle sampling, and even standard CTD and in situ fluorescence profiling.

Sieracki, M.E., D.J. Gifford, S.M. Gallager, and C.S. Davis. 1998. Ecology of a Chaetoceros socialis lauder patch on Georges Bank: Distribution, microbial associations, and grazing losses. Oceanography 11(1):30–35, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1998.12.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.