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Pond life has made significant contributions to science. Ponds are commonplace in many countries and are readily accessible and their contents are easy to sample. The earliest work on the light microscope by Leeuwenhoek used pond organisms to demonstrate the capabilities of the new instrument "he discovered at least three forms of life.
A defining feature of a pond is the presence of standing water which provides habitat for a biological community commonly referred to as pond life. Because of this, many ponds and lakes contain large numbers of endemic species that have gone through adaptive radiation to become specialized to their preferred habitat. [18]
The term limnology was coined by François-Alphonse Forel (1841–1912) who established the field with his studies of Lake Geneva.Interest in the discipline rapidly expanded, and in 1922 August Thienemann (a German zoologist) and Einar Naumann (a Swedish botanist) co-founded the International Society of Limnology (SIL, from Societas Internationalis Limnologiae).
There are three basic types of freshwater ecosystems: 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).
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 relationships between living organisms in their physical environment.
Life arose from the Earth's first ocean, which formed some 3.8 billion years ago. [33] Since then, water continues to be the most abundant molecule in every organism. Water is important to life because it is an effective solvent, capable of dissolving solutes such as sodium and chloride ions or other small molecules to form an aqueous solution.
A pond is an area filled with water, either natural or artificial, that is smaller than a lake. [11] It may arise naturally in floodplains as part of a river system, or be a somewhat isolated depression (such as a kettle, vernal pool, or prairie pothole). It may contain shallow water with marsh and aquatic plants and animals. [12]
An aquatic ecosystem is an ecosystem found in and around a body of water, in contrast to land-based terrestrial ecosystems.Aquatic ecosystems contain communities of organisms—aquatic life—that are dependent on each other and on their environment.