Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The pelagic food web, showing the central involvement of marine microorganisms in how the ocean imports nutrients from and then exports them back to the atmosphere and ocean floor. A marine food web is a food web of marine life. At the base of the ocean food web are single-celled algae and other plant-like organisms known as phytoplankton.
A planktivore is an aquatic organism that feeds on planktonic food, including zooplankton and phytoplankton. [1] [2] Planktivorous organisms encompass a range of some of the planet's smallest to largest multicellular animals in both the present day and in the past billion years; basking sharks and copepods are just two examples of giant and microscopic organisms that feed upon plankton.
Phytoplankton (/ ˌ f aɪ t oʊ ˈ p l æ ŋ k t ə n /) are the autotrophic (self-feeding) components of the plankton community and a key part of ocean and freshwater ecosystems.The name comes from the Greek words φυτόν (phyton), meaning 'plant', and πλαγκτός (planktos), meaning 'wanderer' or 'drifter'.
The most abundant species of coccolithophore, Emiliania huxleyi is an ubiquitous component of the plankton base in marine food webs. [56] Management strategies are being employed to prevent eutrophication-related coccolithophore blooms, as these blooms lead to a decrease in nutrient flow to lower levels of the ocean.
Recent studies of marine microzooplankton found 30–45% of the ciliate abundance was mixotrophic, and up to 65% of the amoeboid, foram and radiolarian biomass was mixotrophic. [5] Phaeocystis is an important algal genus found as part of the marine phytoplankton around the world.
The result is high primary production by photosynthetic life such as phytoplankton and floating sargassum; zooplankton, free-floating creatures ranging from microscopic foraminiferans to small fish and shrimp, feed on the phytoplankton (and one another); both trophic levels in turn form the base of the food chain (or, more properly, web) that ...
Intertidal food web highlighting nodes and links of (A) artisanal fisheries and (B) plankton [137] To compound things, removal of biomass from the ocean occurs simultaneously with multiple other stressors associated to climate change that compromise the capacity of these socio-ecological systems to respond to perturbations.
The marine carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is taken up by phytoplankton for photosynthesis and incorporated into the marine food web. When plankton or predator dies, sedimentation of organic matter reaches the seafloor, where carbon can be buried and sequestered.