The hidden world of the ocean's tiniest organisms
has been revealed in a series of papers Science. An international team has been studying samples of plankton collected during
a three-year global expedition. They have so far found 35,000 species of
bacteria, 5,000 new viruses and 150,000 single-celled plants and creatures.
They believe that the majority of these are new to science. Planktons are
minute organisms, but all together they make up 90% of the mass of all of the
marine life in the oceans. They include viruses, bacteria and single-celled plants and creatures
(protozoa).They are the producers of the food chain and produce, through
photosynthesis, half of the oxygen we breathe.
By Montana Dalmau
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32831814
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