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The roots and rhizomes of seagrasses stabilise sediments and prevent erosion to the land. Their leaves filter suspended nutrients from the water column. This in turn links them to coral reefs, mangroves, salt marshes, and even oyster reefs (Bjork, Mats, et al.).
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.
These meadows account for more than 10% of the ocean's total carbon storage. Per hectare, it holds twice as much carbon dioxide as rain forests and can sequester about 27.4 million tons of CO 2 annually. [85] Seagrass meadows provide food for many marine herbivores. Sea turtles, manatees, parrotfish, surgeonfish, sea urchins and pinfish feed on ...
With positive buoyancy (e.g. floating fruit), ocean surface currents freely move propagules, and dispersal distances are only limited by the viability time of the fruit, [55] [56] leading to exceptionally long single dispersal events (more than 100 km), [57] which is rare for passive abiotic movement of terrestrial fruit and seeds.
The tiny marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, discovered in 1986, forms today part of the base of the ocean food chain and accounts for more than half the photosynthesis of the open ocean [23] and an estimated 20% of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. [24]
This "kelp highway hypothesis" suggested that highly productive kelp forests supported rich and diverse marine food webs in nearshore waters, including many types of fish, shellfish, birds, marine mammals, and seaweeds that were similar from Japan to California, Erlandson and his colleagues also argued that coastal kelp forests reduced wave ...
Posidonia oceanica, commonly known as Neptune grass or Mediterranean tapeweed, is a seagrass species that is endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. [2] It forms large underwater meadows that are an important part of the ecosystem.
Food crops Some aquatic plants are used by humans as a food source. Examples include wild rice ( Zizania ), water caltrop ( Trapa natans ), Chinese water chestnut ( Eleocharis dulcis ), Indian lotus ( Nelumbo nucifera ), water spinach ( Ipomoea aquatica ), prickly waterlily ( Euryale ferox ), and watercress ( Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum ).