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An aquatic ecosystem is an ecosystem found in and around a body of water, in contrast to land-based terrestrial ecosystems. Aquatic ecosystems contain communities of organisms—aquatic life—that are dependent on each other and on their environment. The two main types of aquatic ecosystems are marine ecosystems and freshwater ecosystems. [1]
Marine ecosystems can be divided into many zones depending upon water depth and shoreline features. The oceanic zone is the vast open part of the ocean where animals such as whales, sharks, and tuna live.
There are three basic types of freshwater ecosystems: Lentic (slow moving water, including pools, ponds, and lakes), lotic (faster moving water, for example streams and rivers) and wetlands (areas where the soil is saturated or inundated for at least part of the time). [2] [1] Freshwater ecosystems contain 41% of the world's known fish species. [3]
Marine life, sea life or ocean life is the collective ecological communities that encompass all aquatic animals, plants, algae, fungi, protists, single-celled microorganisms and associated viruses living in the saline water of marine habitats, either the sea water of marginal seas and oceans, or the brackish water of coastal wetlands, lagoons ...
Macrophytes perform many ecosystem functions in aquatic ecosystems and provide services to human society. One of the important functions performed by macrophyte is uptake of dissolved nutrients including nitrogen and phosphorus. [40] Macrophytes are widely used in constructed wetlands around the world to remove excess N and P from polluted ...
Physical properties of aquatic ecosystems are determined by a combination of heat, currents, waves and other seasonal distributions of environmental conditions. [13] The morphometry of a body of water depends on the type of feature (such as a lake, river, stream, wetland, estuary etc.) and the structure of the earth surrounding the body of water.
The ecology of the bathypelagic ecosystem is constrained by its lack of sunlight and primary producers, with limited production of microbial biomass via autotrophy. The trophic networks in this region rely on particulate organic matter (POM) that sinks from the epipelagic and mesopelagic water, and oxygen inputs from the thermohaline ...
A freshwater aquatic food web. The blue arrows show a complete food chain (algae → daphnia → gizzard shad → largemouth bass → great blue heron). A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community.