Salps have attracted attention as zooplankton organisms that may be able to expand their habitat range and increase their ecological importance in the face of ongoing global warming. Due to their gelatinous nature, unique feeding strategy, and reproductive ecology such changes could have profound impacts on regional marine ecosystems. While their role in the regional carbon cycle is receiving attention, our knowledge of their physiology and life cycle is still limited. This knowledge gap is mainly due to their fragile gelatinous nature, which makes it difficult to capture and maintain intact specimen in the laboratory. We present here a modified kreisel tank system that has been tested onboard a research vessel with the Southern Ocean salp Salpa thompsoni and at a research station with Salpa fusiformis and Thalia democratica from the Mediterranean Sea. Successful maintenance over days to weeks allowed us to obtain relative growth and developmental rates comparable to in situ field samples of S. thompsoni and S. fusiformis, and provided insights into previously unknown features of their life cycle (e.g., testes development). Our results show that traditional methods of estimating growth, such as cohort analysis, may lead to a general overestimation of growth rates and neglect individual strategies (e.g., shrinkage), which can affect the results and conclusions drawn from population dynamic models. By providing a starting point for the successful maintenance of different species, comparable experiments on the physiology of salps is made possible. This will contribute to refining model parameters and improving the reliability of the predictions.

中文翻译：

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用于研究中上层被囊动物（樽海鞘）生长和发育的温控循环维护系统

樽海鞘作为浮游动物生物体而引起人们的关注，面对持续的全球变暖，它们可能能够扩大其栖息地范围并提高其生态重要性。由于它们的凝胶性质、独特的摄食策略和繁殖生态，这种变化可能对区域海洋生态系统产生深远的影响。尽管它们在区域碳循环中的作用受到关注，但我们对其生理和生命周期的了解仍然有限。这种知识差距主要是由于它们脆弱的凝胶性质，这使得在实验室中捕获和保持完整的标本变得困难。我们在此介绍一种改进的 kreisel 水箱系统，该系统已在南大洋樽海鞘研究船上进行了测试汤氏萨尔帕并在一个研究站梭形萨尔帕和民主塔利亚来自地中海。数天至数周的成功维护使我们能够获得与原位田间样本相当的相对生长和发育速率汤普森沙门氏菌和梭形链霉菌，并提供了对其生命周期以前未知特征（例如睾丸发育）的见解。我们的结果表明，估计增长的传统方法（例如队列分析）可能会导致对增长率的普遍高估并忽略个体策略（例如收缩），这可能会影响从人口动态模型得出的结果和结论。通过为不同物种的成功维持提供一个起点，可以对樽海鞘的生理学进行可比较的实验。这将有助于细化模型参数并提高预测的可靠性。