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The organisms responsible for primary production are called primary producers or autotrophs. Most marine primary production is generated by a diverse collection of marine microorganisms called algae and cyanobacteria. Together these form the principal primary producers at the base of the ocean food chain and produce half of the world's oxygen ...
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 ...
The three basic ways in which organisms get food are as producers, consumers, and decomposers. Producers are typically plants or algae. Plants and algae do not usually eat other organisms, but pull nutrients from the soil or the ocean and manufacture their own food using photosynthesis. For this reason, they are called primary producers.
In the simplest scheme, the first trophic level (level 1) is plants, then herbivores (level 2), and then carnivores (level 3). The trophic level equals one more than the chain length, which is the number of links connecting to the base. The base of the food chain (primary producers or detritivores) is set at zero.
Gross primary production (GPP) is the amount of chemical energy, typically expressed as carbon biomass, that primary producers create in a given length of time. Some fraction of this fixed energy is used by primary producers for cellular respiration and maintenance of existing tissues (i.e., "growth respiration" and " maintenance respiration ").
The principal marine primary producers are cyanobacteria, algae and marine plants. The oxygen released as a by-product of photosynthesis is needed by nearly all living things to carry out cellular respiration. In addition, primary producers are influential in the global carbon and water cycles. They stabilize coastal areas and can provide ...
The first primary producers that used photosynthesis were oceanic cyanobacteria about 2.3 billion years ago. [ 79 ] [ 80 ] The release of molecular oxygen by cyanobacteria as a by-product of photosynthesis induced global changes in the Earth's environment.
To be a consumer, an organism does not necessarily need to be carnivorous; it could only eat plants (producers), in which case it would be located in the first level of the food chain above the producers. Some carnivorous plants, like the Venus flytrap, are classified as both a producer and a consumer. [2]