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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.
Plankton contributes approximately half of the global primary production, supports marine food webs, influences the biogeochemical process in the ocean, and strongly affects commercial fisheries. [ 148 ] [ 149 ] [ 150 ] Indeed, an overall decrease in marine plankton productivity is expected over global scales.
[99] [100] The dominant pelagic grazers of phytoplankton are typically associated with distinct operating modes of the food web compartments and nutrient cycling. Heterotrophic protist grazers and microzooplankton dominance is usually associated with the microbial loop and regenerated production; while mesozooplankton is associated with a ...
The microbial food web refers to the combined trophic interactions among microbes in aquatic environments. These microbes include viruses, bacteria, algae, heterotrophic protists (such as ciliates and flagellates). [1] In aquatic ecosystems, microbial food webs are essential because they form the basis for the cycling of nutrients and energy.
Photosynthetic bacterioplankton are responsible for a large proportion of the total primary production of aquatic food webs, supplying organic compounds to higher trophic levels. These bacteria undergo oxygenic and anoxygenic photosynthesis. Differences between these processes can be seen in the byproducts produced, the primary electron donor ...
The marine neuston, organisms living at the ocean surface, are one of the least studied planktonic groups. Neuston occupies a restricted ecological niche and is affected by a wide range of endogenous and exogenous processes while also being a food source to zooplankton and fish migrating from the deep layers and seabirds.
A group of friends exploring the waters off La Jolla Cove on Saturday came across a sea creature unlike anything they'd ever seen: a 12-foot-long rare fish from the depths of the ocean.
The tiny (0.6 μm) marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, discovered in 1986, forms today an important part of the base of the ocean food chain and accounts for much of the photosynthesis of the open ocean [140] and an estimated 20% of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. [141]