A Comparative Study of the Far Eastern Seas and the Northern Pacific Ocean Based on Integral Parameters of Net Zooplankton in the Epipelagic Layer

Integral parameters of zooplankton community, including species diversity and its components were compared between the Chukchi Sea, Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Sea of Japan, and adjacent Pacific waters based on the data obtained by standard Juday net with a mouth area of 0.1 m² during the large-scale surveys conducted by the Pacific Fisheries Research Center (TINRO Center) in 1984–2013. These parameters were calculated for the total surveyed area of approximately 7.0 million km² and separately for each of the considered water bodies. In Pacific waters, species richness is higher than that in all the seas, while the concentration of individuals (expressed in terms of abundance, ind./m³) and evenness of their distribution over species were lower. The only sea with a larger mean size of organisms compared to the ocean is the Bering Sea. A lower species diversity than in the ocean has been recorded only from the Chukchi Sea; a lower density (in terms of biomass, g/m³) was determined only from the Sea of Japan. Among the four seas, the Chukchi Sea ranks first in terms of biomass and abundance of zooplankton, second in species evenness, third in the mean size of individuals, and last in species richness and diversity. The Bering Sea ranks first in terms of mean size of plankton organisms, second in species richness, diversity, and biomass, third in abundance, and last in species evenness. The Sea of Okhotsk ranks second in terms of mean size of individuals, last in their abundance, and third in the other parameters. The Sea of Japan ranks first in terms of species richness, evenness, and diversity, second in abundance, and last in mean size of zooplankton organisms, and, therefore, their biomass. The biomass of zooplankton, in accordance with the concentration of nutrients, increases in the southto-north direction (while its absolute abundance depends largely on the size of the body of water). The mean size of organisms increases in the same direction; the evenness of their distribution over species increases in the reverse direction (with the exception of both parameters for the Chukchi Sea). The rank of a water body for its biodiversity coincides with the species richness rank. The latter increases from north to south (except for the Okhotsk Sea), but greatly depends on the surveyed area and, even more, on the surveyed volume of water. A study of the literature data found some unexpected statistically significant relationships of the integral parameters of zooplankton with those of pelagic and bottom macrofauna, as well as with the parameters of zooplankton production, on the size of the considered bodies of water. The causes and the biological meanings of most of these relationships still do not have any rational interpretation. Their testing at other spatial scales will be continued in future works.