Definition: Active swimming organisms that live in the water column and are able to move independently of the water mass (adapted from Lincoln et al., 1998).
Definition: A linear shoaling landform feature within a body of water. Bars tend to be long and narrow (linear) and develop where a current (or waves) promote deposition of granular material, resulting in localized shallowing (shoaling) of the water. Bars can appear in the sea, in a lake, or in a river. They are typically composed of sand, although could be of any granular matter that the moving water has access to and is capable of shifting around (for example, soil, silt, gravel, cobble, shingle, or even boulders). The grain size of the material comprising a bar is related: to the size of the waves or the strength of the currents moving the material, but the availability of material to be worked by waves and currents is also important.
Definition: Hard framework, internal or external, which supports and protects softer parts of plant, animal or unicellular organism, and to which muscles usually attach in animals, includes skeletons (derived from Lawrence, 2005).
Definition: A group of species that exploit the same food resources, and/or use the same feeding or foraging methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_(ecology)
Definition: a sub-group of suspension feeding animals that feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water, typically by passing the water over a specialized filtering structure
Definition: position of an organism in a food web. May be described verbally with descriptors including primary producer, herbivore or carnivore. If described numerically, 1 indicates a primary producer, 2 a herbivore, and so on up the food web.
