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The photic zone (or euphotic zone, epipelagic zone, or sunlight zone) is the uppermost layer of a body of water that receives sunlight, allowing phytoplankton to perform photosynthesis. It undergoes a series of physical, chemical, and biological processes that supply nutrients into the upper water column .
Seaweeds are found along coastal areas, living on the floor of continental shelves and washed up in intertidal zones. Some seaweeds drift with plankton in the sunlit surface waters (epipelagic zone) of the open ocean. Back in the Silurian, some phytoplankton evolved into red, brown and green algae.
More than 100 species of fishes develop and grow in surface slick nurseries before transitioning to adults (solid white lines radiating outward) in Coral Reefs (7–12), Epipelagic (13–15), and Deep-water (16–17) ocean habitats.
A top-down cascade is a trophic cascade where the top consumer/predator controls the primary consumer population. In turn, the primary producer population thrives. The removal of the top predator can alter the food web dynamics. In this case, the primary consumers would overpopulate and exploit the primary producers.
This is the most common form of vertical migration. Organisms migrate on a daily basis through different depths in the water column. Migration usually occurs between shallow surface waters of the epipelagic zone and deeper mesopelagic zone of the ocean or hypolimnion zone of lakes. [2] There are three recognized types of diel vertical migration:
In the deep ocean, the waters extend far below the epipelagic zone, and support very different types of pelagic life forms adapted to living in these deeper zones. [ 67 ] Much of the aphotic zone 's energy is supplied by the open ocean in the form of detritus .
The aquatic microbial loop is a marine trophic pathway which incorporates dissolved organic carbon into the food chain.. The microbial loop describes a trophic pathway where, in aquatic systems, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is returned to higher trophic levels via its incorporation into bacterial biomass, and then coupled with the classic food chain formed by phytoplankton-zooplankton-nekton.
Water is the medium of the oceans, the medium which carries all the substances and elements involved in the marine biogeochemical cycles. Water as found in nature almost always includes dissolved substances, so water has been described as the "universal solvent" for its ability to dissolve so many substances.