Today marks one half of the Dallas portion of the class, and we finnaly got to the biology part of marine biology. We started learned about plankton. I found out that the character Plankton for the show Spongebob isn’t really a plankton, because plankton have no control over where they go. We learned that there are two types of plankton, phytoplankton and zooplankton. Phytoplankton are plankton that produce their own food using photosynthesis. Even though they’re tiny, they make most of the world’s oxygen, because of how many there are. The other kind of plankton, zooplankton, are actually tiny animals. Most of them are animal larva and juveniles, but some of them spend their whole lives as plankton.
Plankton are very important, not only because they supply the world with oxygen, but also because they make up the bottom level of the food chain. Phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton, which are eaten by small fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, and so on and so on. Plankton are also eaten by some of the biggest organims, like whales and whale sharks.
