Radiolaria are marine zooplankton with siliceous skeletons. They can grow from sizes of a 50?µm to several mm. They are globales abundant in the entire water column, habiting the surface ocean down to down of 4000m
I starten studying radiolaria due to their siliceaous skeletons and their appearence in the sediments of the coastal upwelling Region off Peru. Radiolaria are largely understudied and little is known of their living Stratege Otter than their global distribution based on Plankton net and Sediment trap data. A previous study on Silikon Isotope compostions of radiolaria from the Sediments of the SOuthern Ocean implied that the silicon isotope composition of radiolarian tests correlates to the DSi concentrations of the water column they lived in.
The Peruvian Upwelling region is one of the best studied areas in terms of combined d30Si and DSi concentration data from the water column due to the effort of nearly a decade of work from Patricia Grasse and colleagues