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Some cyanobacteria – even single-celled ones – show striking collective behaviours and form colonies (or blooms) that can float on water and have important ecological roles. For instance, billions of years ago, communities of marine Paleoproterozoic cyanobacteria could have helped create the biosphere as we know it by burying carbon ...
The microcystin-producing Microcystis is a genus of freshwater cyanobacteria and thrives in warm water conditions, especially in stagnant waters. [7] The EPA predicted in 2013 that climate change and changing environmental conditions may lead to harmful algae growth and may negatively impact human health. [ 20 ]
Abundant growth of cyanobacteria in freshwater, estuarine, and coastal ecosystems due to increased anthropogenic eutrophication and global climate change has created serious concern toward harmful bloom formation and surface water contamination. [8] Cyanobacteria are considered the most primitive groups of photosynthetic prokaryotes [9] and ...
Bioluminescent bacteria are light-producing bacteria that are predominantly present in sea water, marine sediments, the surface of decomposing fish and in the gut of marine animals. While not as common, bacterial bioluminescence is also found in terrestrial and freshwater bacteria. [ 125 ]
Salt-tolerant archaea (the Haloarchaea) use sunlight as an energy source, and other species of archaea fix carbon; however, unlike plants and cyanobacteria, no known species of archaea does both. Archaea reproduce asexually by binary fission , fragmentation , or budding ; unlike bacteria and eukaryotes, no known species forms spores .
Originally, biologists thought cyanobacteria was algae, and referred to it as "blue-green algae". The more recent view is that cyanobacteria are bacteria, and hence are not even in the same Kingdom as algae. Most authorities exclude all prokaryotes, and hence cyanobacteria from the definition of algae. [26] [27]
Synechococcus is one of the most important components of the prokaryotic autotrophic picoplankton in the temperate to tropical oceans. The genus was first described in 1979, [5] [6] and was originally defined to include "small unicellular cyanobacteria with ovoid to cylindrical cells that reproduce by binary traverse fission in a single plane and lack sheaths". [7]
Forage fish: Forage fish occupy central positions in the ocean food webs. The organisms it eats are at a lower trophic level, and the organisms that eat it are at a higher trophic level. Forage fish occupy middle levels in the food web, serving as a dominant prey to higher level fish, seabirds and mammals. [28] Predator fish; Ground fish