Copepods are a key component of marine zooplankton communities and play a key role in linking primary productivity, higher trophic levels, and the marine carbon sink. Their carbon flux is strongly regulated by species-specific behavioral modes, including differences in feeding strategies, activity frequency, and the associated variation in energy expenditure. These behavioral differences ultimately lead to substantial variability in carbon intake through feeding and respiratory carbon loss across different behavioral types. However, most current studies about temperature effects on copepod carbon flux rely on averaged metabolic parameters that do not explicitly account for behavioral mode differences in regulating energy budgets. This may lead to biased estimates or misrepresentation of carbon flux variability, thus increasing uncertainty in community-scale carbon cycling assessments.

Based on this, three coastal copepod species with distinct feeding and behavioral strategies were selected to investigate the mechanistic differences in carbon metabolic responses under a temperature-gradient incubation experiment. During the experiment, hourly high-frequency continuous observations were conducted to quantify changes in carbon intake via feeding, respiratory carbon loss, and net carbon balance across different temperatures, thereby helping revealing the pathways through which behavioral differences regulate carbon flux.

This study aims to refine temperature-driven carbon flux responses from a behavioral mechanism perspective, revealing how behavioral heterogeneity shapes the temporal variability of carbon cycling at the community scale. The results provide a basis for improving the parameterization and modeling of copepod-mediated carbon flux under high-resolution observational frameworks.