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For example, Tokunagayusurika akamusi is a species of midge fly whose larvae live as obligate scavengers at the bottom of lakes and whose adults almost never feed and only live up to a few weeks. Most scavenging animals are facultative scavengers that gain most of their food through other methods, especially predation .
This dead and decaying matter sustains the benthic food chain; most organisms in the benthic zone are scavengers or detritivores. Some microorganisms use chemosynthesis to produce biomass. Benthic organisms can be divided into two categories based on whether they make their home on the ocean floor or a few centimeters into the ocean floor.
From shallow waters to the deep sea, the open ocean to rivers and lakes, numerous terrestrial and marine species depend on the surface ecosystem and the organisms found there. [28] The ocean's surface acts like a skin between the atmosphere above and the water below, and harbours an ecosystem unique to this environment.
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Pelagic zones. The ocean can be conceptualized as being divided into various zones, depending on depth, and presence or absence of sunlight.Nearly all life forms in the ocean depend on the photosynthetic activities of phytoplankton and other marine plants to convert carbon dioxide into organic carbon, which is the basic building block of organic matter.
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.
Benthos are negatively impacted by fishing, pollution and litter, deep-sea mining, oil and gas activities, tourism, shipping, invasive species, climate change (and its impacts such as ocean acidification, ocean warming and changes to ocean circulation) and construction such as coastal development, undersea cables, and wind farm construction.
Ocean currents are also generated by the gravitational pull of the sun and moon , and seismic activity . [17] The rotation of the Earth affects the direction ocean currents take, and explains which way the large circular ocean gyres rotate in the image above left. Suppose a current at the equator is heading north.