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A freshwater aquatic food web. The blue arrows show a complete food chain (algae → daphnia → gizzard shad → largemouth bass → great blue heron). A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community.
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.
While the pelagic food web is based upon phytoplankton production, most of this production is diverted to the benthos via predation by the introduced Amur River clam (Corbula amurensis). Levels of phytoplankton biomass declined by an order of magnitude after the widespread introduction of C. amurensis in the mid-1980s, and have not rebounded.
Phytoplankton form the base of marine and freshwater food webs and are key players in the global carbon cycle. They account for about half of global photosynthetic activity and at least half of the oxygen production, despite amounting to only about 1% of the global plant biomass.
The two main types of aquatic ecosystems are marine ecosystems and freshwater ecosystems. [1] Freshwater ecosystems may be lentic (slow moving water, including pools, ponds, and lakes); lotic (faster moving water, for example streams and rivers); and wetlands (areas where the soil is saturated or inundated for at least part of the time). [2]
The food base of streams within riparian forests is mostly derived from the trees, but wider streams and those that lack a canopy derive the majority of their food base from algae. Anadromous fish are also an important source of nutrients. Environmental threats to rivers include loss of water, dams, chemical pollution and introduced species. [14]
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Oxsjön, a lake in Sweden. Freshwater biology focuses on environments like lakes. A pond in the Oconee River Floodplain in Georgia, whose surface is covered in duckweed but still contains fish. Freshwater biology is the scientific biological study of freshwater ecosystems and is a branch of limnology. This field seeks to understand the ...