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Phytoplankton in sentence

32 examples of Phytoplankton in a sentence

But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem.
And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it.
And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life.
Indirect measurements have shown that the global phytoplankton population may have decreased by as much as 40 percent between 1950 and 2010 because of climate change.
The nitrogen and the phosphorus stimulate the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton.
And small animals called zooplankton eat the phytoplankton, small fish eat the zooplankton, large fish eat the small fish and it goes on up into the food web.
The problem is that there's just too much nitrogen and phosphorus right now, too much phytoplankton falling to the bottom and decomposed by bacteria that use up the oxygen.
And what that means is more phytoplankton and more sinking sails and lower oxygen.
But the real powers of this place come from phytoplankton.
Well, it now turns out that the whales are crucial to sustaining that entire ecosystem, and one of the reasons for this is that they often feed at depth and then they come up to the surface and produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes, huge explosions of poop right across the surface waters, up in the photic zone, where there's enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place, and those great plumes of fertilizer stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain, which stimulate the growth of zooplankton, which feed the fish and the krill and all the rest of it.
The other thing that whales do is that, as they're plunging up and down through the water column, they're kicking the phytoplankton back up towards the surface where it can continue to survive and reproduce.
Well there's an invisible pasture of microscopic photosynthesizers called phytoplankton that fill the upper 200 meters of the ocean, and they feed the entire open ocean ecosystem.
So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet.
So there are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, come in all different shapes and sizes, all roughly less than the width of a human hair.
I call them the charismatic species of phytoplankton.
About 38 years ago, we were playing around with a technology in my lab called flow cytometry that was developed for biomedical research for studying cells like cancer cells, but it turns out we were using it for this off-label purpose which was to study phytoplankton, and it was beautifully suited to do that.
And the chlorophyl of phytoplankton, which is green, emits red light when you shine blue light on it.
And so we used this instrument for several years to study our phytoplankton cultures, species like those charismatic ones that I showed you, just studying their basic cell biology.
But all that time, we thought, well wouldn't it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like.
And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean.
There are winners and losers in this global experiment that we've undertaken, and it's projected that among the losers will be some of those larger phytoplankton, those charismatic ones which are expected to be reduced in numbers, and they're the ones that feed the zooplankton that feed the fish that we like to harvest.
This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters where they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which forms the base of all marine food chains.
Life in the Arctic includes organisms living in the ice, zooplankton and phytoplankton, fish and marine mammals, birds, land animals, plants, and human societies.
These are diatoms, single-celled phytoplankton with skeletons of silicon ... circuit boards of the future.
These are blooms of phytoplankton that you can see from space along the West Coast of the United States.
These are blooms of toxin-producing phytoplankton that can contaminate food webs and accumulate in shellfish and fish that are harvested for human consumption.
So this is hard-won data I'm about to talk about, OK? (Laughter) So by combining all of our data with our collaborators, we had 20-year time series of toxins and phytoplankton cell counts.
And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton, but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy.
Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton.
"I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing.