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Water forms the ocean, produces the high density fluid environment and greatly affects the oceanic organisms. Sea water produces buoyancy and provides support for plants and animals.
Zooplankton feed on bacterioplankton, phytoplankton, other zooplankton (sometimes cannibalistically), detritus (or marine snow) and even nektonic organisms. As a result, zooplankton are primarily found in surface waters where food resources (phytoplankton or other zooplankton) are abundant. Zooplankton can also act as a disease reservoir.
Ichthyoplankton (from Greek: ἰχθύς, ikhthus, "fish"; and πλαγκτός, planktos, "drifter" [1]) are the eggs and larvae of fish. They are mostly found in the sunlit zone of the water column, less than 200 metres deep, which is sometimes called the epipelagic or photic zone.
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.
For example, zooplankton are widespread microscopic animals and protists that feed on algae and detritus in the ocean, such as foraminifera. Microfauna also aid in digestion and other processes in larger organisms.
Zooplankton and salps play a large role in the active transport of fecal pellets. 15–50% of zooplankton biomass is estimated to migrate, accounting for the transport of 5–45% of particulate organic nitrogen to depth. [40] Salps are large gelatinous plankton that can vertically migrate 800 meters and eat large amounts of food at the surface.
Jellyfish are slow swimmers, and most species form part of the plankton. Traditionally jellyfish have been viewed as trophic dead ends, minor players in the marine food web, gelatinous organisms with a body plan largely based on water that offers little nutritional value or interest for other organisms apart from a few specialised predators such as the ocean sunfish and the leatherback sea turtle.
Zooplankton; However, there is a simpler scheme that categorizes plankton based on a logarithmic size scale: Macroplankton (200–2000 μm) Micro-plankton (20–200 μm) Nanoplankton (2–20 μm) This was even further expanded to include picoplankton (0.2–2 μm) and fem-toplankton (0.02–0.2 μm), as well as net plankton, ultraplankton.