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The ocean represents the largest continuous planetary ecosystem, hosting an enormous variety of organisms, which include microscopic biota such as unicellular eukaryotes (protists). Despite their small size, protists play key roles in marine biogeochemical cycles and harbour tremendous evolutionary diversity.
A protist (/ ˈ p r oʊ t ɪ s t / PROH-tist) or protoctist is any eukaryotic organism that is not an animal, plant, or fungus.Protists do not form a natural group, or clade, but are a paraphyletic grouping of all descendants of the last eukaryotic common ancestor excluding plants, animals, and fungi.
Protists are highly diverse organisms currently organised into 18 phyla, but are not easy to classify. [89] [90] Studies have shown high protist diversity exists in oceans, deep sea-vents and river sediments, suggesting a large number of eukaryotic microbial communities have yet to be discovered.
Along with more standard examples of nutritional symbioses in animals, recent advances in genome sequencing technology have led to the discovery of many endosymbiotic associations in marine protists (a protist is a general term to refer to a non-monophyletic collection of unicellular eukaryotes that are not fungi or in the Plantae group) These ...
The classification of this area of protists is still unsettled. In terms of rank, they have been treated as a division , phylum , kingdom , or something intermediate to those. Consequently, diatoms are ranked anywhere from a class, usually called Diatomophyceae or Bacillariophyceae , to a division (=phylum), usually called Bacillariophyta ...
Marine botany is the study of flowering vascular plant species and marine algae that live in shallow seawater of the open ocean and the littoral zone, along shorelines of the intertidal zone, coastal wetlands, and low-salinity brackish water of estuaries.
Example Further examples Called nonconstitutive mixotrophs by Mitra et al., 2016. [51] Zooplankton that are photosynthetic: microzooplankton or metazoan zooplankton that acquire phototrophy through chloroplast retention a or maintenance of algal endosymbionts. Generalists Protists that retain chloroplasts and rarely other organelles from many ...
Areas in the ocean have been identified as having a major lack of some B Vitamins, and correspondingly, phytoplankton. [27] The effects of anthropogenic warming on the global population of phytoplankton is an area of active research. Changes in the vertical stratification of the water column, the rate of temperature-dependent biological ...