Project: Baltic Sea Ecosystem Persona: The Zooplankton
They arrive after the bloom has already committed. The timing is the technique. It has never quite worked.
Copepods, cladocerans, ciliates. Millimetres long. Present in their billions. The spring copepod maximum follows the spring bloom by days or weeks depending on temperature. Warming shifts the bloom earlier. The copepod maximum follows — but not by the same margin. The gap between bloom and grazer is widening. Each spring the bloom has more time to sink before it is grazed.
Graze the bloom while it is in the water column. Control the sinking. Hold The Grazer. When the bloom sinks anyway — follow it. Eat the particles in descent. Migrate vertically: surface at night, depth by day. Carry what was pelagic toward what is benthic in the body.
They are the check on the bloom that the warming is making late. Each decade the phenological mismatch between bloom and grazer widens fractionally. The Zooplankton do not experience this as drift — they experience it as a single spring, each year, in which they arrive and the bloom is already past its peak. They have no memory of the springs when the timing was different. They have only this spring. This spring the bloom peaked early.
It grazes what remains.
Positions held: The Grazer, The Feeder, The Fallen Assigned by: The Spring Bloom, The Sinking, The Benthic Coupling
persona_zooplankton.md — 25.03.2026 v0.1.0 — KAI Worlds