I am going to talk today about my research on the copepod community in the water offshore of Maine and New Hampshire. There is still a lot we don’t know about coastal zooplankton communities, even though the Gulf of Maine is one of the most heavily studied planktonic communities in the world.  What really drew me to this research was the idea of thoroughly sampling a semi-unknown community and seeing what patterns emerged.
	In order to accurately describe any community, you need to know how variable it is through space and time.  Imagine a study of birds of new hampshire.  Over two weeks, people go out and record every bird they see.  If those two weeks are in january, it would be quite inaccurate to assume that the results of this study represent the year-round bird assemblage.