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The word zooplankton is derived from Ancient Greek: ζῷον, romanized: zôion, lit. 'animal'; and πλᾰγκτός, planktós, 'wanderer; drifter'. [4] Zooplankton is a categorization spanning a range of organism sizes including small protozoans and large metazoans.
Plankton can be divided into producers and consumers. The producers are the phytoplankton (Greek phyton = plant) and the consumers, who eat the phytoplankton, are the zooplankton (Greek zoon = animal). Jellyfish are slow swimmers, and most species form part of the plankton. Traditionally, jellyfish have been viewed as trophic dead ends.
Part of the contents of one dip of a hand net.The image contains diverse planktonic organisms, ranging from photosynthetic cyanobacteria and diatoms to many different types of zooplankton, including both holoplankton (permanent residents of the plankton) and meroplankton (temporary residents of the plankton, e.g., fish eggs, crab larvae, worm larvae).
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.
Primary consumers have longer lifespans and slower growth rates that accumulates more biomass than the producers they consume. Phytoplankton live just a few days, whereas the zooplankton eating the phytoplankton live for several weeks and the fish eating the zooplankton live for several consecutive years. [ 49 ]
[1] [2] [3] The three-domain system of classifying life adds another division: the prokaryotes are divided into two domains of life, the microscopic bacteria and the microscopic archaea, while everything else, the eukaryotes, become the third domain. [4] Prokaryotes play important roles in ecosystems as decomposers recycling nutrients.
This means primary producers become the starting point in the food chain for heterotroph organisms that do eat other organisms. Some marine primary producers are specialised bacteria and archaea which are chemotrophs, making their own food by gathering around hydrothermal vents and cold seeps and using chemosynthesis.
They are both primary producers and primary consumers in these ecosystems and drive global biogeochemical cycling of elements essential for life (e.g., carbon and nitrogen). Many bacterioplankton species are autotrophic, and derive energy from either photosynthesis or chemosynthesis.