A clear insight into the large-scale community structure of planktonic copepods is critical to understanding the mechanisms controlling diversity and biogeography of marine taxa in terms of their high abundance, ubiquity, and sensitivity to environmental changes. Here, we applied a 28S metabarcoding approach to large-scale communities of epipelagic and mesopelagic copepods at 70 stations across the Pacific Ocean and three stations in the Arctic Ocean. Major patterns of community structure and diversity, influenced by water mass structures, agreed with results from previous morphology-based studies. However, a largescale metabarcoding approach could detect community changes even under stable environmental conditions, including changes in the north/south subtropical gyres and east/west areas within each subtropical gyre. There were strong effects of the epipelagic environment on mesopelagic communities, and community subdivisions were observed in the environmentally stable mesopelagic layer. In each sampling station, higher operational taxonomic unit (OTU) numbers and lower phylogenetic diversity were observed in the mesopelagic layer than in the epipelagic layer, indicating a recent rapid increase in species numbers in the mesopelagic layer. The phylogenetic analysis utilizing representative sequences of OTUs revealed trends of recent emergence of cold-water OTUs, which are mainly distributed at high latitudes with low water temperatures. Conversely, the high diversity of copepods at low latitudes was suggested to have been formed through long evolution under high water temperature conditions. The metabarcoding results suggest that evolutionary processes have strong impacts on current patterns of copepod diversity, and support the "out of the tropics" theory explaining latitudinal diversity gradients of copepods. Diversity patterns in both epipelagic and mesopelagic copepods was highly correlated to sea surface temperature; thus, predicted global warming may have a significant impact on copepod diversity in both layers.

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Dinitrogen fixation, the biological reduction in N2 gas to ammonia contributes to the supply of new nitrogen in the surface ocean. To understand the diversity and abundance of potentially diazotrophic (N2 fixing) microorganisms associated with marine zooplankton, especially copepods, the nifH gene was studied using zooplankton samples collected in the Pacific Ocean. In total, 257 nifH sequences were recovered from 23 nifH‐positive DNA extracts out of 90 copepod samples. The nifH genes derived from cyanobacteria related to Trichodesmium, α‐ and γ‐subdivisions of proteobacteria, and anaerobic euryarchaeota related to Methanosaeta concilii were detected. Our results indicated that Pleuromamma, Pontella, and Euchaeta were the major copepod genera hosting dinitrogen fixers, though we found no species‐specific association between copepods and dinitrogen fixers. Also, the digital PCR provided novel data on the number of copies of the nifH gene in individual copepods, which we report the range from 30 to 1666 copies per copepod. This study is the first systematic study of zooplankton‐associated diazotrophs, covering a large area of the open ocean, which provide a clue to further study of a possible new hotspot of N2 fixation.

Abstract:To investigate the vertical zonation in the copepod community in relation to stratified water-masses, multi-layer sampling at 1-2-m intervals using a submersible pump was conducted on 6 August 2009 in the inner part of Tokyo Bay, central Japan. Acartia sinjiensis showed a peak of the population density in the surface water, which was influenced by river discharge, and Paracalanus parvus s.l. had a peak contrastingly in the mid layer, which was intruded by coastal water from out of the bay through estuary circulation. Calanus sinicus occurred in the coastal water layer with other oceanic copepods. The most dominant species, Oithona davisae showed a remarkable peak in the pycnocline in the 3-6-m layer. Adults of Labidocera rotunda and Pseudodiaptomus marinus and immature copepodids of Hemicylops japonicus accumulated just above the hypoxic bottom-water (DOϽ1.0 mg L Ϫ1 ). The shallower peak of the bimodally distributed Acartia omorii was very sharp and seemed to be formed by predation by the moon jellyfish Aurelia aurita s.l. on the copepods in the layers above and below the peak. The vertical zonation in the copepod community were reflected by the characteristic environmental conditions in Tokyo Bay in the summer, i.e. estuary circulation, hypoxia in the bottom layer and the distribution of jellyfish.

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