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Marine life, sea life, or ocean life is the plants, animals, and other organisms that live in the salt water of seas or oceans, or the brackish water of coastal estuaries. At a fundamental level, marine life affects the nature of the planet. Marine organisms, mostly microorganisms, produce oxygen and sequester carbon.
Tardigrade. Tardigrades (/ ˈtɑːrdɪɡreɪdz /), [1] known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, [2][3][4][5] are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. [2][6] They were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773, who called them Kleiner Wasserbär ('little water bear'). [7]
e. Marine microorganisms are defined by their habitat as microorganisms living in a marine environment, that is, in the saltwater of a sea or ocean or the brackish water of a coastal estuary. A microorganism (or microbe) is any microscopic living organism or virus, which is invisibly small to the unaided human eye without magnification.
Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms that inhabit the sea. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather than on taxonomy.
Gnathostomulid. Gnathostomulids, or jaw worms, are a small phylum of nearly microscopic marine animals. They inhabit sand and mud beneath shallow coastal waters and can survive in relatively anoxic environments. They were first recognised and described in 1956. [1]
Microfauna (Ancient Greek mikros "small" + Neo-Latin fauna "animal") refers to microscopic animals and organisms that exhibit animal-like qualities, and have body sizes that are usually <0.1mm. [1][2] Microfauna are represented in the animal kingdom (e.g. nematodes, small arthropods) and the protist kingdom (i.e. protozoans).
Animals are multicellular eukaryotes, [note 1] and are distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. [1] Marine invertebrates are animals that inhabit a marine environment apart from the vertebrate members of the chordate phylum; invertebrates lack a vertebral column. Some have evolved a shell or a hard exoskeleton.
Loricifera. Loricifera (from Latin, lorica, corselet (armour) + ferre, to bear) is a phylum of very small to microscopic marine cycloneuralian sediment-dwelling animals with 43 described species. [ 3] and approximately 100 more that have been collected and not yet described. [ 4] Their sizes range from 100 μm to ca. 1 mm. [ 5]