The global estimates of the biological pump have yet to include the elements of the lipid pump which could represent 50–100% of C export that is not accounted for. This is likely due to many observational challenges pertaining to the analysis of these seasonal migrations. As described above, more accurate ways to measure both mortality and respiration rates of overwintering zooplankton are being conducted in recent work, which are the two factors that primarily control the amount of lipid carbon that is sequestered at depth. For the zooplankton that survive overwintering, their upward migration during the spring returns a fraction of the lipid reserves to the surface as nonrespired carbon, with losses attributed to predation by deep-dwelling predators, disease, starvation, and other sources of mortality generally not accounted for. Similar to the lysis shunt, the dynamics of the lipid shunt causes uncertainty in observational methods of the lipid pump when comparing its efficiency to that of the biological pump. Additionally, large zooplankton usually avoid mooring instruments such as sediment traps during seasonal migrations which further explains why the lipid pump has yet to become incorporated into estimates of the global carbon export flux. These observations can be challenging to make given the remote locations they are conducted in and the harsh, deep sampling conditions, but these adaptations in the data collection are needed to better integrate global estimates of the carbon export flux provided by the lipid pump.