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A marine coastal ecosystem is a marine ecosystem which occurs where the land meets the ocean. Worldwide there is about 620,000 kilometres (390,000 mi) of coastline. Coastal habitats extend to the margins of the continental shelves, occupying about 7 percent of the ocean surface area.
The young fry live at sea for two to three weeks and then migrate during the juvenile stage to mangrove swamps, estuaries, and sometimes lakes, and return to sea to mature sexually and reproduce. Juveniles prefer to settle in undisturbed coastal ecosystems that are semi-enclosed, calm, shallow, free from predators, and rich in aquatic vegetation.
Bony fish have jaws and skeletons made of bone rather than cartilage. About 90% of the world's fish species are bony fish. Bony fish also have hard, bony plates called operculum which help them respire and protect their gills, and they often possess a swim bladder which they use for better control of their buoyancy.
While the full implications of elevated CO 2 on marine ecosystems are still being documented, there is a substantial body of research showing that a combination of ocean acidification and elevated ocean temperature, driven mainly by CO 2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, have a compounded effect on marine life and the ocean environment. This ...
Aquaculture has been the fastest growing food sector in the world for decades, and people now eat more farmed fish than wild fish. The industry has had to grow. Demand for seafood is soaring and ...
Census scientists visited many parts of the global ocean to learn more about species ranging in size from the blue whale to minute zooplankton and microbes (bacteria and viruses); sampled from the world's coldest regions to the warm tropics, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to coastal ecosystems; tracked the movements of fish and interrogated ...
Altogether the ocean occupies 71 percent of the world surface, [4] averaging nearly 3.7 kilometres (2.3 mi) in depth. [27] By volume, the ocean provides about 90 percent of the living space on the planet. [4] The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out it would be more appropriate to refer to planet Earth as planet Ocean. [28] [29]
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 ...