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Under a magnifier, a splash of seawater teems with microscopic life. Microscopic life undersea is diverse and still poorly understood, such as for the role of viruses in marine ecosystems. [13] Most marine viruses are bacteriophages, which are harmless to plants and animals, but are essential to the regulation of saltwater and freshwater ...
Marine life, sea life or ocean life is the collective ecological communities that encompass all aquatic animals, plants, algae, fungi, protists, single-celled microorganisms and associated viruses living in the saline water of marine habitats, either the sea water of marginal seas and oceans, or the brackish water of coastal wetlands, lagoons ...
Microscopic life undersea is diverse and still poorly understood, such as for the role of viruses in marine ecosystems. [55] Most marine viruses are bacteriophages , which are harmless to plants and animals, but are essential to the regulation of saltwater and freshwater ecosystems.
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.
Some modern authors prefer to exclude multicellular organisms from the traditional definition of a protist, restricting protists to unicellular organisms. [9] [10] This more constrained definition excludes all brown, the multicellular red and green algae, and, sometimes, slime molds (slime molds excluded when multicellularity is defined as ...
There are exceptions, such as Sargassum, but the vast majority of free-floating production takes place within microscopic organisms. The factors limiting primary production in the ocean are also very different from those on land. The availability of water, obviously, is not an issue (though its salinity can be).
A microorganism, or microbe, [a] is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells. The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from ancient times, such as in Jain scriptures from sixth century BC India.
The various sorts of algae play significant roles in aquatic ecology. Microscopic forms that live suspended in the water column (phytoplankton) provide the food base for most marine food chains. In very high densities (algal blooms), these algae may discolor the water and outcompete, poison, or asphyxiate other life forms.