The Weddell Sea, Southern Ocean, is a highly productive location of deep-water formation and a globally important site of carbon sequestration. Here, the biological carbon pump is dominated by carbon-rich particulates which are both actively and passively transported to deep water (e.g. zooplankton faecal pellets and phytoplankton detritus). However, climate driven changes in sea ice have the potential to disrupt these process...

Marine plankton are an important and diverse group of organisms that make up the lower trophic levels of the marine food web. They play several critical roles in the ocean that have direct or indirect societal benefits, including supporting food security, oxygen production, and carbon sequestration via the biological carbon pump. Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) has been making weekly measurements of zooplankton and phytoplank...

Size‐spectral approaches quantify the efficiency of energy transfer through food webs, but theory and field studies disagree over how changes in temperature, nutrients, and extreme weather impact on this efficiency. We address this at two scales: via 6 years of weekly sampling of the plankton size spectrum at the Plymouth L4 shelf sea site, and via a new, global‐scale, meta‐analysis of aquatic size spectra. The time series sho...

The Plymouth L4 time plankton series in the Western English Channel is a textbook example of a shallow, stratifying shelf sea system. Over its 30 yr of weekly sampling, this site has provided a diverse and contrasting suite of numerical and conceptual models of plankton bloom formation, phenology, and seasonal succession. The most recent of these papers, Kenitz et al. (2017) has initiated this comment, partly because we feel t...