The Biology of Pelagic Tunicates

Pelagic tunicates play an important role in the sea as filter feeding animals of the macroplankton in geochemical cycling. This text provides a full account of all the Tunicate groups, and should be of use to plankton workers as it contains keys to aid identification.

Pelagic tunicates are fascinating for their beauty, remarkable in most cases for their curious and even bizarre life cycles, and often notable for extraordinarily rapid growth. Furthermore, in recent years their major importance in the economy of the sea has been recognized.Although the now outdated encyclopaedic texts of the 1930s dealt with pelagic tunicates, the results of much subsequent physiological and ecological work have only appeared in scattered articles. This book is unique in giving a modern account of the biology of pelagic tunicates, with much new and unpublished information. Different chapters treat such topics as the ecological impact of salp blooms, locomotion by jet propulsion, the affinities of different groups, and the abundance and distribution of each group. Updated classification and identification keys to every pelagic tunicate now known are included.The Biology of Pelagic Tunicates will be useful to all plankton workers, and may perhaps stimulate ecologists, physiologists, and geneticists to begin work on a somewhat neglected group of animals that offer some unusual advantages for different kinds of study.