You can find many of these kinds of organisms if you look under the microscope and explore the microbial plankton , the tiny organisms that live in the water world. Not only are there plants that eat, there are animals that photosynthesize! These fascinating, mixed ways of getting and making food are called mixotrophy and the organisms that perform mixotrophy are called mixotrophs meaning mixed nutrition. Phytoplankton are microscopic plant-like organisms that live in the water.
Their name tells us that they live on light phyto and drift with the water plankton. Every drop of water normally contains hundreds of thousands of these tiny, single-celled organisms.
There are many hundreds of different types of phytoplankton. For decades, most scientists have thought that phytoplankton lived only by photosynthesis. It turns out that many of these phytoplankton also eat the way animals do [ 1 ]. Some eat other phytoplankton, some eat bacteria, and some eat tiny animals Figure 2.
Some of these mixotroph phytoplankton eat only reluctantly or rarely. Some are aggressive and can stuff themselves full of food! These mixotrophs grow much faster when they can eat and photosynthesize at the same time, compared with when they grow by photosynthesis alone. The ways the mixotrophic phytoplankton eat can be pretty gruesome. Some gobble up entire organisms, while some harpoon their food and suck out the innards using a self-made straw.
Some can make their meal explode, leaving a nutritious soup that they can soak up. Some can even eat other organisms that are much bigger than themselves.
Some mixotrophic phytoplankton use poisons to kill what they want to eat. Interestingly, some can make these poisons only when they photosynthesize AND eat at the same time. An example is an organism called Karlodinium.
Karlodinium eats other small algae aggressively, but it seems to only eat during daylight. Why does it not also eat at night? It turns out that Karlodinium makes the poisonous compound that it releases to kill its food during daytime, when it is also photosynthesizing. Along with phytoplankton, there are other, tiny animal-like organisms in the ocean that are called microzooplankton , because they are small micro- , animal zoo- -like plankton.
Microzooplankton eat lots of different things, but when they eat tiny phytoplankton, they can become part-time plants.
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Image Assorted Plankton Plankton are the unseen heroes of many ecosystems providing food to a wide variety of species from tiny bivalves to whales. Image by Dr. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. Also called a food cycle. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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Marine Ecosystems and Biodiversity. View Lesson. Marine Food Chain. View leveled Article. This is one example of thousands of types of phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are microscopic plants, but they play a huge role in the marine food web. A copepod shown here is a type of zooplankton, a planktonic crustacean distantly related to shrimp and crabs. Copepods are one of the most common and easily recognized types of zooplankton, found in almost every ocean, sea, and freshwater habitat, even in underground caverns.
Image credit: NASA. Zooplankton include microscopic animals krill, sea snails, pelagic worms, etc.
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