File:Phytoplankton - the foundation of the oceanic food chain m.jpg

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Food Chain & Oxygen

Big Trouble Ahead for Ocean's Microbes ○ http://grist.org/news/big-trouble-ahead-for-oceans-tiny-microbes/

Phytoplankton are the foundation of the oceanic food chain ○ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton

The Food Chain's Weak Link: Tiny Ocean Plants Dying ○ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128823662

○ Microscopic Algae/Plankton Being Born

○ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phytoplankton_-_the_foundation_of_the_oceanic_food_chain.jpg

○ Discovery of a Marine Ecotone -- http://plankt.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/2/107.full

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Enormous Plankton database

Now Available for Science / May 2015

○ http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32831814

Dr Bowler: "It is temperature that determines what sort of communities of organisms we find. If we look at our data and we see what organisms are there, we can predict with 97% probability the temperature of the water they are living in.

"These organisms are most sensitive to temperature, more than anything else, and with changing temperatures as a result of climate change we are likely to see changes in this community."

The researchers say that this scientific analysis is just the beginning. They are making their findings freely available to the scientific community to gain a better understanding of this vital but unseen underwater world.

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The Air We Breathe

"A single kind of blue-green algae in the ocean produces the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take"

~ from "The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One" by Sylvia Earle

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"The Tiny Little Ones - Plankton"

"The life of the oceans"

National Geo for Students: Save the Plankton

Students calculate how many of the breaths they take each day come from one variety of (blue-green algae) phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus

○ Micro Close-up Views -- http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/subjects/main/algae

○ Marine Algae: The Most Important Organism?

Phytoplankton and Photosynthesis on Earth

Rarely Studied and Observed, but Profoundly Essential

It is estimated that marine plants produce between 70 and 80 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere... Nearly all marine plants are single celled, photosynthetic algae... Even marine seaweed is, many times, colonial algae. They are a bunch of single cells trying to look like a big plant ('seaweed' - kelp)... Think about it, 70 percent to 80 percent of all the oxygen we breathe...

Why does so much of our oxygen come from algae? First of all, remember that the oceans cover about 71 percent of this planet and land is only about 29 percent... Overall, the production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land

○ Phytoplankton obtain energy through the process of photosynthesis and must therefore live in the well-lit surface layer (termed the euphotic zone) of an ocean, sea, lake, or other body of water...

Phytoplankton are responsible for a vital, life-enabling percentage of the oxygen present in the Earth’s atmosphere – over half of the total amount produced by all plant life.

Tiny Blue Green

○ www.tinybluegreen.com

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Phytoplankton.jpg

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Phyto_glowing_beauty_of_the_oceans.jpg

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