This Collective Article presents information about 30 species with records in eight countries (Greece, Israel, Italy, Montenegro, Slovenia, Spain, Syria and Türkiye) and six ecoregions extending from the Alboran to the Levantine Seas. The recorded species belong to eight Phyla (4 Chlorophyta, 1 Rhodophyta, 1 Porifera, 3 Cnidaria, 2 Platyhelminthes, 2 Arthropoda, 2 Mollusca and 15 Chordata) as follows: Chlorophyta: Didymosporan...

Marine ecosystems, from coastal areas to open waters, teem with a multitude of heterotrophic and mixotrophic organisms collectively forming the zooplankton, the animal component of the plankton [...]

Among non-native copepods, the calanoid Pseudodiaptomus marinus Sato, 1913 is the species probably spreading at the fastest pace in European and neighbouring waters since its first record in the Adriatic Sea in 2007. In this contribution, we provide an update on the distribution of P. marinus in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, along the Atlantic coasts of Europe, in the English Channel and in the southern North Sea. Starting...

Centropages typicus is a temperate calanoid copepod occurring in Atlantic and Mediterranean coastal waters, where its reproductive biology and population dynamics are well‐known. C. typicus has also been suggested as a key species for monitoring the impact of environmental changes on copepod secondary production. The aim of this study is to investigate the seasonal and interannual reproductive (egg production and egg hatching...

Long‐term ecological research has revealed the impact of climate on marine ecosystems at multiple time scales. Changes in the pelagic system have been detected at the LTER‐MC site in the Gulf of Naples (Tyrrhenian Sea, western Mediterranean) since 1984. Here we analyzed the time series to determine whether zooplankton had significantly changed over the three decades 1984–2015. In addition to the seasonal cycle as the main mode...

Molecular tools increasingly refine and improve the identification of zooplankton organisms based on phenotypic features, providing a more robust and comprehensive species description. Integration of data helps revealing the hidden diversity of zooplankton and facilitating the detection of rare and non‐indigenous species. This approach, merging morphological characters and a diagnostic marker for specific identification, such...

Zooplankton molecular analyses allow for accurate species identification with a proper molecular signature, complementing classic phenotypic-based taxonomy (α taxonomy). For the first time in the Mediterranean Sea, cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene sequences of calanoid copepods were associated with morphological identification, HD and SEM images, using a fully integrated approach to assess taxonomic diversity. Such method was a...

The internal organization of plankton communities plays a key role in biogeochemical cycles and in the functioning of aquatic ecosystems. In this study, the structure of a marine plankton community (including both unicellular and multicellular organisms) was inferred by applying an ecological network approach to species abundances observed weekly at the long‐term ecological research station M are C hiara ( LTER ‐ MC ) in the G...