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The ocean represents the largest continuous planetary ecosystem, hosting an enormous variety of organisms, which include microscopic biota such as unicellular eukaryotes (protists). Despite their small size, protists play key roles in marine biogeochemical cycles and harbour tremendous evolutionary diversity.
Marine microorganisms are defined by their habitat as microorganisms living in a marine environment, that is, in the saltwater of a sea or ocean or the brackish water of a coastal estuary. A microorganism (or microbe) is any microscopic living organism or virus, which is invisibly small to the unaided human eye without magnification ...
Invisible to the naked eye, there is a teeming world of microbes living in the ocean with a complexity and diversity that rivals all other life on Earth. They include bacteria, viruses, archaea, protists, and fungi. If you weighed all the living organisms in the ocean, 90 percent of that weight would be from microbes.
Science. 11 Dec 2015. Vol 350, Issue 6266. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8455. The ocean microbial system. The vast translucent oceans are teeming with microscopic life that drives significant life processes and elemental cycling on Earth. Yet how climate change will affect the functioning of this microbiome is not well understood.
- Mary Ann Moran
- 2015
Apr 1, 2024 · The ocean microbiome is one of the main engines of the biosphere [ 1 ]. A massive number of cells populates it, with global estimates indicating ~ 10 29 prokaryotic cells and ~ 10 30 viruses [ 2, 3 ]. In one milliliter of open ocean water, there are typically 10 3 protists, 10 6 prokaryotes, and 10 7 viruses [ 4 ].
The oceans harbor a tremendous diversity of marine microbes. Different functional groups of bacteria, archaea, and protists arise from this diversity to dominate various habitats and drive globally important biogeochemical cycles.
