Zooplankton

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Zooplankton

Zooplankton are the heterotroph

Heterotroph

A heterotroph is an organism that organic compound substrates to get its Energy#Chemical energy for its life cycle. This contrasts with autotrophs such as plants which are able to directly use sources of energy such as light to produce organic substrates from inorganic carbon dioxide....
ic (sometimes detritivorous

Detritivore

Detritivores, also known as detritus feeders or saprophages, are heterotrophs that obtain nutrients by consuming detritus . By doing so, they contribute to decomposition and the nutrient cycles....
) type of plankton

Plankton

Plankton consist of any drifting organisms that inhabit the pelagic zone of oceans, seas, or bodies of fresh water. Plankton are defined by their ecological niche rather than their Phylogenetics or taxonomy classification....
. Plankton are organisms drifting in the water column

Pelagic zone

Any water in the sea that is not close to the bottom is in the pelagic zone. The word pelagic comes from the Greek language p??a??? or p?lagos, which means open sea....
of ocean

Ocean

An ocean is a major body of Seawater, and a principal component of the hydrosphere. Approximately 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean, a World Ocean that is customarily divided into several principal oceans and smaller seas....
s, sea

SEA

See also: Sea and seasThe three-letter acronym SEA may refer to:People/organizations/businesses*Scientists and Engineers for America, a pro-science political advocacy group....
s, and bodies of fresh water

Fresh Water

Fresh Water is the debut album by Australian rock and blues singer Alison McCallum, released in 1972. Rare for an Australian artist at the time, it came in a gatefold sleeve....
.

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Ecology

Zooplankton is a broad categorisation spanning a range of organism

Organism

In biology, an organism is any life thing . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimulus , reproduction, growth and developmental biology, and maintenance of homeostasis as a stable whole....
sizes that includes both small protozoa

Protozoa

Protozoan are microorganisms classified as unicellular eukaryotes. While there is no exact definition of the term "protozoan", most scientists use the word to refer to a unicellular heterotrophic protist, such as an amoeba or a ciliate....
ns and large metazoans. It includes holoplankton

Holoplankton

Holoplankton are organisms that are planktonic for their entire life cycle. Examples of holoplankton include diatoms, radiolarians, dinoflagellates, foraminifera, amphipods, krill, copepods, and salps....
ic organisms whose complete life cycle

Biological life cycle

A life cycle is a period involving one generation of an organism through means of reproduction, whether through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction....
lies within the plankton, and meroplankton

Meroplankton

Meroplankton are organisms that are planktonic for only a part of their life cycles, usually the larval stage. Examples of meroplankton include the larvae of sea urchins, sea stars, crustaceans, marine worms, and most fish....
ic organisms that spend part of their life cycle in the plankton before graduating to either the nekton

Nekton

Nekton refers to the aggregate of actively swimming aquatic organisms in a body of water able to move independently of water currents. Nekton are contrasted with 'plankton' which refers to the aggregate of passively floating, drifting, or somewhat motile organisms occurring in a body of water, primarily comprising tiny algae and bacteria, s...
or a sessile

Sessility (zoology)

In zoology, sessility is a characteristic of animals which are not able to move about. They are usually permanently attached to a solid Wiktionary:substrate of some kind, such as a rock , or the Hull of a ship in the case of barnacles....
, benthic

Benthos

Benthos are the organisms which live on, in, or near the seabed, also known as the benthic zone. They live in or near marine sedimentary environments, from tidal pools along the Intertidal zone, out to the continental shelf, and then down to the Abyssal zone....
existence. Although zooplankton are primarily transported by ambient water currents, many have some power of locomotion

Animal locomotion

In biomechanics, animal locomotion is the study of how animals motion . Most animals move in order to find food, a mate, escape predators, find suitable microhabitats, etc....
and use this to avoid predators (as in diel vertical migration

Diel vertical migration

Diel vertical migration refers to a pattern of movement that some organisms living in the ocean's photic zone undertake each day. The organisms that exhibit this pattern of behaviour range in size from microscopic plankton through to much larger nekton such as fish....
) or to increase prey encounter rate.

Ecologically

Ecology

Ecology is the science study of the distribution and Abundance of life and the interactions between organisms and their nature environment ....
important protozoan zooplankton groups include the foraminifera

Foraminifera

The Foraminifera, or forams for short, are a large group of amoeboid protists with reticulating pseudopods, fine strands of cytoplasm that branch and merge to form a dynamic net....
ns, radiolarians and dinoflagellate

Dinoflagellate

The dinoflagellates are a large group of flagellate protists. Most are marine plankton, but they are common in fresh water habitats as well. Their populations are distributed depending on sea surface temperature, salinity, or depth....
s (the latter are often mixotroph

Mixotroph

A mixotrophic organism is one that obtains its electrons from an inorganic electron source , but uses organic matter as a carbon source. Some of these organisms are facultative chemolithotrophs or facultative chemoorganotrophs, and are capable of using either metabolism depending on environmental conditions....
ic). Important metazoan zooplankton include cnidaria

Cnidaria

Cnidaria Cnidarians were for a long time grouped with Ctenophores in the phylum Coelenterata, but increasing awareness of their differences caused them to be placed in separate phyla....
ns such as jellyfish

Jellyfish

Jellyfish are free-swimming members of the phylum Cnidaria. They have several different morphologies that represent several different cnidarian classes including the Scyphozoa , Staurozoa , Cubozoa , and Hydrozoa ....
and the Portuguese Man o' War

Portuguese Man o' War

The Portuguese Man o' War , also known as the blue bubble, blue bottle, man-of-war, or the Portuguese man of war, is a jelly-like, marine invertebrate of the family: Physaliidae, order: Siphonophora, class: Hydrozoa, and Phylum: Cnidaria....
; crustaceans such as copepod

Copepod

Copepods are a group of small crustaceans found in the sea and nearly every fresh water habitat . Many species are planktonic , but more are benthos , and some continental species may live in limno-terrestrial habitats and other wet terrestrial places, such as swamps, under leaf fall in wet forests, bogs, springs, ephemeral ponds and puddle...
s and krill

Krill

Krill are a type of shrimp-like marine invertebrate animal. These small crustaceans are important organisms of the zooplankton, particularly as food for baleen whales, manta rays, whale sharks, crabeater seals, and other pinniped, and a few seabird species that feed almost exclusively on them....
; chaetognaths (arrow worms); molluscs

Mollusca

MolluscsSpelled mollusk in the USA; the spelling "mollusc" is preferred by some authors, see the reasons given by . are animals belonging to the Phylum Mollusca....
such as pteropods; and chordate

Chordate

Chordates are a group of animals that includes the vertebrates, together with several closely related invertebrates. They are united by having, at some time in their life cycle, a notochord, a hollow dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, an endostyle, and a post-anal tail....
s such as salp

Salp

A salp is a barrel-shaped, free-floating tunicate. It moves by contracting, thus pumping water through its gelatinous body. The salp strains the pumped water through its internal feeding filters, feeding on phytoplankton that it sieves out of the water....
s and juvenile fish

Fish

A fish is any marine biology vertebrate animal that is typically ectothermic , covered with scale , and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins....
. This wide phylogenetic range includes a similarly wide range in feeding

Feeding

Feeding is the process by which organisms, typically animals, obtain food. Terminology often uses either the suffix -vore from Latin vorare, meaning 'to devour', or phagy, from Greek fa?e??, meaning 'to eat'....
behavior: filter feeding

Filter feeder

Filter feeders are animals that feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water, typically by passing the water over a specialized filtering structure....
, predation

Predation

In ecology, predation describes a biological interaction where a predator feeds on its prey, the organism that is attacked. Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation always results in the death of the prey....
and symbiosis

Symbiosis

The term symbiosis commonly describes close and often long-term interactions between different biological species. The term was first used in 1879 by the Germany mycology Heinrich Anton de Bary, who defined it as "the living together of unlike organisms"....
with autotrophic phytoplankton

Phytoplankton

Phytoplankton are the autotrophic component of the plankton community. The name comes from the Greek language words phyton, or "plant", and p?a??t?? , meaning "wanderer" or "drifter"....
as seen in corals. Zooplankton feed on bacterioplankton

Bacterioplankton

Bacterioplankton refers to the bacterium component of the plankton that drifts in the water column. The name comes from the Ancient Greek word , meaning "wanderer" or "drifter" , and , a Latin neologism coined in the 19th century by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg....
, phytoplankton, other zooplankton (sometimes cannibalistically

Cannibalism (zoology)

In zoology, cannibalism is the act of one individual of a species consuming all or part of another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecology interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded for more than 1500 species ....
), detritus

Detritus

Detritus is a biological term used to describe dead or waste organic material.Detritus may also refer to:* Detritus , a geological term used to describe the particles of rock produced by weathering...
(or marine snow

Marine snow

In the deep ocean, marine snow is a continuous shower of mostly organic detritus falling from the upper layers of the water column. Its origin lies in activities within the productive photic zone....
) and even nektonic organisms. As a result, zooplankton are primarily found in surface waters where food resources (phytoplankton or other zooplankton) are most abundant.

Through their consumption and processing of phytoplankton (and other food sources), zooplankton play an important role in aquatic food webs, both as a resource for consumers on higher trophic level

Trophic level

In ecology, trophic dynamics is the system of trophic levels , which describe the position that an organism occupies in a food chain — what an organism eats, and what eats the organism....
s (including fish), and as a conduit for packaging the organic material in the biological pump

Biological pump

In oceanic biogeochemistry, the biological pump is the sum of a suite of biologically-mediated processes that transport carbon from the surface euphotic zone to the ocean's interior....
. Since they are typically of small size, zooplankton can respond relatively rapidly to increases in phytoplankton abundance, for instance, during the spring bloom

Spring bloom

The spring bloom is a sudden and strong bloom of phytoplankton such as diatoms or dinoflagellates in the spring in temperate and sub-polar bodies of water....
.

Aside from this role in aquatic food webs, zooplankton can also act as an important disease

Infectious disease

An infectious disease is a clinically evident disease resulting from the presence of pathogenic microbial agents, including pathogenic viruses, pathogenic bacteria, Mycosis, protozoa, multicellular parasites, and aberrant proteins known as prions....
reservoir

Natural reservoir

Natural reservoir or nidus, refers to the long-term host of the pathogen of an infectious disease. It is often the case that hosts do not get the disease carried by the pathogen or it is asymptomatic and non-lethal....
. They have been found to house the bacterium Vibrio cholerae
Vibrio cholerae

Vibrio cholerae is a motile gram negative curved-rod shaped bacterium with a polar flagellum that causes cholera in humans. V. cholerae and other species of the genus Vibrio belong to the gamma subdivision of the Proteobacteria....
, causative agent of cholera

Cholera

Cholera, sometimes known as Asiatic or epidemic cholera, is an infectious gastroenteritis caused by enterotoxin-producing strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae....
, by allowing the cholera vibrios to attach to their chitinous exoskeleton

Exoskeleton

An exoskeleton is an external skeleton that supports and protects an animal's body, in contrast to the internal endoskeleton of, for example, a human skeleton....
s. This symbiotic relationship greatly enhances the bacterium's ability to survive in an aquatic environment, as the exoskeleton provides the bacterium with an abundant source of carbon and nitrogen.

External links

. A global coverage database of zooplankton biomass and abundance data.
, images of planktonic species
,