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Under a magnifier, a splash of seawater teems with microscopic life. Microscopic life undersea is diverse and still poorly understood, such as for the role of viruses in marine ecosystems. [13] Most marine viruses are bacteriophages, which are harmless to plants and animals, but are essential to the regulation of saltwater and freshwater ...
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 ...
Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms that inhabit the sea.Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather than on taxonomy.
Phytoplankton are then consumed at the next trophic level in the food chain by microscopic animals called zooplankton. Zooplankton constitute the second trophic level in the food chain, and include microscopic one-celled organisms called protozoa as well as small crustaceans, such as copepods and krill, and the larva of fish, squid, lobsters ...
Marine prokaryotes have been the dominant life form for most of Earth's history, perhaps because water protected them from ionizing radiation [8] The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago, [ 12 ] [ 13 ] during the Eoarchean Era after ...
A microorganism, or microbe, [a] is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells.. The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from ancient times, such as in Jain scriptures from sixth century BC India.
Marine protists are defined by their habitat as protists that live in marine environments, that is, in the saltwater of seas or oceans or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. Life originated as marine single-celled prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) and later evolved into more complex eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are the more developed life forms ...
Phytoplankton are photosynthesizing microscopic protists and bacteria that inhabit the upper sunlit layer of marine and fresh water bodies of water on Earth. Paralleling plants on land, phytoplankton undertake primary production in water, [2] creating organic compounds from carbon dioxide dissolved in the water.