Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Plankton
Summary
Plankton are the diverse collection of organisms found in water (or air) that are unable to propel themselves against a current (or wind). The individual organisms constituting plankton are called plankters. In the ocean, they provide a crucial source of food to many small and large aquatic organisms, such as bivalves, fish, and baleen whales.
Marine plankton include bacteria, archaea, algae, protozoa and drifting or floating animals that inhabit the saltwater of oceans and the brackish waters of estuaries. Freshwater plankton are similar to marine plankton, but are found in lakes and rivers. Mostly plankton just drift where currents take them, though some, like jellyfish, swim slowly but not fast enough to generally gain control from the influence of currents.
Although plankton are usually thought of as inhabiting water, there are also airborne versions that live part of their lives drifting in the atmosphere. These aeroplankton include plant spores, pollen and wind-scattered seeds. They may also include microorganisms swept into the air from terrestrial dust storms and oceanic plankton swept into the air by sea spray.
Though many planktonic species are microscopic in size, plankton includes organisms over a wide range of sizes, including large organisms such as jellyfish. This is because plankton are defined by their ecological niche and level of motility rather than by any phylogenetic or taxonomic classification. The "plankton" category differentiates these organisms from those that float on the water's surface, called neuston, those that can swim against a current, called nekton, and those that live on the deep sea floor, called benthos.
The name plankton was coined by German marine biologist Victor Hensen in 1887 from shortening the word halyplankton from Greek ᾰ̔́λς háls "sea" and πλανάω planáō to "drift" or "wander". While some forms are capable of independent movement and can swim hundreds of meters vertically in a single day (a behavior called diel vertical migration), their horizontal position is primarily determined by the surrounding water movement, and plankton typically flow with ocean currents.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.