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Water is the medium of the oceans, the medium which carries all the substances and elements involved in the marine biogeochemical cycles. Water as found in nature almost always includes dissolved substances, so water has been described as the "universal solvent" for its ability to dissolve so many substances.
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 ...
As primary consumers, zooplankton are the crucial link between the primary producers (mainly phytoplankton) and the rest of the marine food web (secondary consumers); [191] the ocean's primary producers are mostly tiny phytoplankton which have r-strategist traits of growing and reproducing rapidly, so a small mass can have a fast rate of ...
Marine microorganisms are defined by their habitat as microorganisms living in a marine environment, that is, in the saltwater of a sea or ocean or the brackish water of a coastal estuary. A microorganism (or microbe ) is any microscopic living organism or virus , which is invisibly small to the unaided human eye without magnification .
There are certain primary consumers that are called specialists because they only eat one type of producers. An example is the koala, because it feeds only on eucalyptus leaves. Primary consumers that feed on many kinds of plants are called generalists. Secondary consumers are small/medium-sized carnivores that prey on herbivorous animals.
Phaeocystis is an important algal genus found as part of the marine phytoplankton around the world. It has a polymorphic life cycle, ranging from free-living cells to large colonies. [33] It has the ability to form floating colonies, where hundreds of cells are embedded in a gel matrix, which can increase massively in size during blooms. [34]
Various carnivorans, with feliforms to the left, and caniforms to the right. Carnivora is an order of placental mammals that have specialized in primarily eating flesh. Members of this order are called carnivorans, or colloquially carnivores, though the term more properly refers to any meat-eating organisms, and some carnivoran species are omnivores or herbivores.
Initially, the early representatives of carnivorans were small as the creodonts (specifically, the oxyaenids) and mesonychians dominated the apex predator niches during the Eocene, but in the Oligocene, carnivorans became a dominant group of apex predators with the nimravids, and by the Miocene most of the extant carnivoran families have ...