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The amount and distribution of plankton depends on available nutrients, the state of water and a large amount of other plankton. [8] The study of plankton is termed planktology and a planktonic individual is referred to as a plankter. [9] The adjective planktonic is widely used in both the scientific and popular literature, and is a generally ...
Phytoplankton (/ ˌ f aɪ t oʊ ˈ p l æ ŋ k t ə n /) are the autotrophic (self-feeding) components of the plankton community and a key part of ocean and freshwater ecosystems.The name comes from the Greek words φυτόν (phyton), meaning 'plant', and πλαγκτός (planktos), meaning 'wanderer' or 'drifter'.
Zooplankton is a categorization spanning a range of organism sizes including small protozoans and large metazoans. It includes holoplanktonic organisms whose complete life cycle lies within the plankton, as well as meroplanktonic organisms that spend part of their lives in the plankton before graduating to either the nekton or a sessile ...
Plankton are the building blocks of life in the sea. Everything depends on them. ... Most of these are considered macroplankton due to their size (from ¾ of an inch to 8 inches). Amphipods look a ...
Great whites possess large, dagger-like teeth; basking shark teeth are much smaller 5–6 mm (0.20–0.24 in) and hooked; only the first three or four rows of the upper jaw and six or seven rows of the lower jaw function. In behaviour, the great white is an active predator of large animals, not a filter feeder.
However, there is a simpler scheme that categorizes plankton based on a logarithmic size scale: Macroplankton (200–2000 μm) Micro-plankton (20–200 μm) Nanoplankton (2–20 μm) This was even further expanded to include picoplankton (0.2–2 μm) and fem-toplankton (0.02–0.2 μm), as well as net plankton, ultraplankton.
Another classification divides plankton into eight types based on size: in this scheme, diatoms are classed as microalgae. Several systems for classifying the individual diatom species exist. Fossil evidence suggests that diatoms originated during or before the early Jurassic period, which was about 150 to 200 million years ago.
A planktivore is an aquatic organism that feeds on planktonic food, including zooplankton and phytoplankton. [1] [2] Planktivorous organisms encompass a range of some of the planet's smallest to largest multicellular animals in both the present day and in the past billion years; basking sharks and copepods are just two examples of giant and microscopic organisms that feed upon plankton.