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This paper tests the hypothesis that optimal perturbations in quasigeostrophic turbulence are excited sufficiently strongly and frequently to account for the energy-containing eddies. Optimal perturbations are defined here as singular vectors of the propagator, for the energy norm, corresponding to the equations of motion linearized about the time-mean flow. The initial conditions are drawn from a numerical solution of the nonlinear equations associated with the linear propagator. Experiments confirm that energy is concentrated in the leading evolved singular vectors, and that the average energy in the initial singular vectors is within an order of magnitude of that required to explain the average energy in the evolved singular vectors. Furthermore, only a small number of evolved singular vectors (4 out of 4000) are needed to explain the dominant eddy structure when total energy exceeds a predefined threshold. The initial singular vectors explain only 10% of such events, but this discrepancy was similar to that of the full propagator, suggesting that it arises primarily due to errors in the propagator. In the limit of short lead times, energy conservation can be expressed in terms of suitable singular vectors to constrain the energy distribution of the singular vectors in statistically steady equilibrium. This and other connections between linear optimals and nonlinear dynamics suggests that the positive results found here should carry over to other systems, provided the propagator and initial states are chosen consistently with respect to the nonlinear system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]