Zooplankton fill a crucial link between phytoplankton (“the grass of the sea”) and larger, open-ocean animals. An account of the tools that have been employed to collect zooplankton has been recently prepared by Wiebe and Benfield (2000), and provides a description of standard sampling methods. In turn, the billions of cells produced might absorb enough heat-trapping carbon dioxide to cool the Earth’s warming atmosphere.

• Despite the extreme environment, organisms here must find food and mates and avoid predators, just as they do in any ecosystem, and they have special adaptations that allow them to do so.

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• These tiny cells, some only a micron across, are invisible but present in numbers of hundreds of thousands of cells per tablespoon of ocean water.

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• Scientists think that the extent of sea ice and the temperature of the ocean each year may influence the balance between salp and krill populations.

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• Many creatures called zooplankton are also tiny protists, but the category simultaneously includes animals on the other end of the size scale.

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• Every evening in the ocean, animals that spend their days in the deep, dark waters of the ocean’s twilight zone swim to the surface to feed.

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• Rising in the dark after sunset, these animals feast on phytoplankton, zooplankton, and other surface-dwelling organisms throughout the night, then return to depth as light returns at dawn.

Microbe Dietary Preferences Influence the Effectiveness of Carbon Sequestration in the Deep Ocean

Small marine animals called zooplankton feed on phytoplankton and are, in turn, eaten by larger marine organisms. The ocean’s so-called biological carbon pump removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it deep in the ocean on timescales that are important to the lifespan of humans. The solubility carbon Bonisa casino pump, which stores much larger amounts of carbon, operates on timescales in the thousands of years and is a much slower mixing process. Through photosynthesis these organisms transform inorganic carbon in the atmosphere and in seawater into organic compounds, making them an essential part of Earth’s carbon cycle.

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• We need to understand the impact such activities would have not only on the ecosystem, but also on the biological carbon pump and its ability to help us fight the climate crisis.

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• The ocean’s so-called biological carbon pump removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it deep in the ocean on timescales that are important to the lifespan of humans.

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• Little is known about the animals that inhabit these waters, and even less is known about microbial life in this zone.

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• The ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide varies over time and space and is predicted to decline over the rest of this century.

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• As the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere rises, the ocean’s pH—a measure of alkalinity and acidity—has fallen, meaning that it has become less alkaline and more acidic.

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• The smallest zooplankton are single-celled protozoans, also called microzooplankton, which eat the smallest phytoplankton cells in the ocean.

Ocean Facts

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• Dense blooms of some organisms can deplete oxygen in coastal waters, causing fish and shellfish to suffocate.

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• Life that exists in this zone must be able to function in cold temperatures and withstand extreme hydrostatic pressure.

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• They take up, transform, and recycle elements needed by other organisms, and help cycle elements between species in the ocean.
• As carbon dioxide levels in surface waters decrease, water is then able to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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• When sunlight hits the ocean’s surface waters, it stimulates tiny marine plants called phytoplankton to photosynthesize.

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• Both salps and krill also live in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, and both feed directly on the great abundance of phytoplankton there.

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Life that exists in this zone must be able to function in cold temperatures and withstand extreme hydrostatic pressure. Despite the extreme environment, organisms here must find food and mates and avoid predators, just as they do in any ecosystem, and they have special adaptations that allow them to do so. Understanding how the biological carbon pump works to export carbon to the deep sea can help researchers improve models of the ocean’s role in climate. The ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide varies over time and space and is predicted to decline over the rest of this century.

Clinging Jelly fish in Groton growing in numbers

Another major category is the gelatinous zooplankton or jellies, unrelated groups that all have soft, transparent bodies and spend much of their life drifting in the water column.

WATCH: New England-based researchers share rare video from ocean’s ‘Twilight Zone’

The resulting bathypelagic, or midnight, zone extends to about 4,000 meters (about 13,100 feet), which reaches the ocean floor in many places. The biological carbon pump plays a huge role in the ocean’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Without it, the amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere would be twice as large as what humans have already added. Most zooplankton spend their entire lives drifting, but the larvae of many fish and bottom-living animals, before they develop adult forms, are also part of this group.