Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
As primary consumers, zooplankton are the crucial link between the primary producers (mainly phytoplankton) and the rest of the marine food web (secondary consumers); [191] the ocean's primary producers are mostly tiny phytoplankton which have r-strategist traits of growing and reproducing rapidly, so a small mass can have a fast rate of ...
Marine primary production is the chemical synthesis in the ocean of organic compounds from atmospheric or dissolved carbon dioxide. It principally occurs through the process of photosynthesis , which uses light as its source of energy, but it also occurs through chemosynthesis , which uses the oxidation or reduction of inorganic chemical ...
As the primary consumers of marine phytoplankton, microzooplankton consume ~ 59–75% daily of the marine primary production, much larger than mesozooplankton. That said, macrozooplankton can sometimes have greater consumption rates in eutrophic ecosystems because the larger phytoplankton can be dominant there.
Primary consumers are herbivores, feeding on plants or algae. Caterpillars, insects, grasshoppers, termites and hummingbirds are all examples of primary consumers because they only eat autotrophs (plants). There are certain primary consumers that are called specialists because they only eat one type of producers. An example is the koala ...
An exception occurs in deep-sea hydrothermal ecosystems, where there is no sunlight. Here primary producers manufacture food through a process called chemosynthesis. [5] Consumers (heterotrophs) are species that cannot manufacture their own food and need to consume other organisms. Animals that eat primary producers (like plants) are called ...
Compared to the North Pacific and Southern Ocean, Equatorial Pacific waters have relatively low levels of biogenic silica and thus do not support significant standing stocks of diatoms. [14] Picoplankton are the most abundant marine primary producers in these regions due mainly to their ability to assimilate low concentrations of trace metals. [14]
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 .
However, it is known that bacterioplankton (i.e. members of Cytophaga-Flavobacterium-Bacteroides, Alphaproteobacteria, and Gammaproteobacteria) significantly promote the dissolution of particulate silica, thus maintaining the significant biogenic silica production in the ocean photic zone. It is also suggested that this process helps regulate ...