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The hydrothermal vents are recognized as a type of chemosynthetic based ecosystems (CBE) where primary productivity is fuelled by chemical compounds as energy sources instead of light (chemoautotrophy). [29] Hydrothermal vent communities are able to sustain such vast amounts of life because vent organisms depend on chemosynthetic bacteria for food.
The evidence suggests that deep-sea hydrothermal vent viral evolutionary strategies promote prolonged host integration, favoring a form of mutualism rather than classic parasitism. [32] As hydrothermal vents outlets [clarification needed] for sub-seafloor material, there is also likely a connection between vent viruses and those in the crust. [39]
The two areas of greatest and most rapid temperature change in the oceans are the transition zone between the surface waters and the deep waters, the thermocline, and the transition between the deep-sea floor and the hot water flows at the hydrothermal vents. Thermoclines vary in thickness from a few hundred meters to nearly a thousand meters.
Hydrothermal circulation in the oceans is the passage of the water through mid-oceanic ridge systems. The term includes both the circulation of the well-known, high-temperature vent waters near the ridge crests, and the much-lower-temperature, diffuse flow of water through sediments and buried basalts further from the ridge crests. [3]
New seafloor forms in places where magma is forced upward toward the surface at a mid-ocean ridge and cools to form volcanic rock. The hydrothermal vents spew into the cold sea the super-heated ...
Hydrothermal vent microbial communities are microscopic unicellular organisms that live and reproduce in the chemically distinct area around hydrothermal vents. These include organisms in microbial mats , free floating cells, and bacteria in endosymbiotic relationships with animals.
Each food chain starts with a primary producer or autotroph, an organism, such as an alga or a plant, which is able to manufacture its own food. Next in the chain is an organism that feeds on the primary producer, and the chain continues in this way as a string of successive predators.
The dominant feature of the planet viewed from space is water – oceans of liquid water flood most of the surface while water vapour swirls in atmospheric clouds and the poles are capped with ice. Taken as a whole, the oceans form a single marine system where liquid water – the "universal solvent" – dissolves nutrients and substances ...