One of the first change that needed to be done was to adapted the trophic relationships. Originally, the zooplankton grazing preferences or palatability were based on a ratio predator:prey of 10 (following Kiorboe et al. 2001). But, in a more recent study from Flyn and Mitra 2016, the optimal palatability changes according to the type of zooplankton. From there, ciliates have an optimal palatability when the prey:predator ESD are around 0.13 whereas copepods tends towards 0.05. Since our metazoans tends to be in the upper range of size for copepods (900 µm to 2400 µm), we used a prey:predator palatability towards the zooplankton of 0.02 which is still within the range given by Flyn and Mitra 2016. The reason why we took such a value for the metazoans is because we assumed that microzooplankton would be a preferred food target for the mesozooplankton (Brogolio et al. 2003; Mitra and Flynn 2005) regarding their internal pool of carbon and nitrogen. As explained previously it will be the interplay between this two nutrients that should drives the diapause dynamic.