Zooplankton organisms play a key role in the pelagic food web due to the transfer of energy from unicellular algae to higher trophic levels. In polar regions zooplankton has to cope with winter ice cover and darkness and hence with a relatively short spring/summer period of food plenty. In general, a variety of zooplankton groups has adapted to these variations by developing biochemical pathways which enable them to accumulate large lipid stores during summer phytoplankton blooms. The importance of lipids is connected to their capability to store energy in a very efficient way. The lipids of copepods, krill, amphipods and other zooplankton species serve as energy for e.g. herring, capelin, cod, seabirds and baleen whales.

Current studies are performed for understanding lipid metabolism and related processes of zooplankton key species (copepods, amphipods, pteropods and ctenophores) in the polar food web in general and in relation to different preys during overwintering situation. Feeding and starvation experiments are performed with the pteropod Clione limacina and on the transfer of lipids from calanoid copepods to the ctenophore Mertensia ovum, the re-conversion of wax esters and the fate of long-chain fatty alcohols of zooplankton origin.