Zooplankton's role in the distributional status of autochthonous Vibrio cholerae: a case study using principal component analysis.

Miscellaneous statistical approaches were applied to illustrate the influence exerted by different zooplankton groups on the survival and distributional status of autochthonous Vibrio cholerae in two diverse marine environments, Veli and Kochi, former with low nutrient loading and later with high nutrient loading. The data set has been factorised using principal component analysis (PCA) for extracting linear relationships existing among a set of variables. Box plots were derived from the PCA data and were graphically represented. Vibrio cholerae (VC) showed strong positive correlation to zooplanktons especially with crustacean copepods under low nutrient conditions which confirmed a clear association between VC and zooplanktons for its surveillance and distribution under low nutrient concentration, while under high nutrient loading VC rely only on the available nutrients.