It might be a change in the distribution of plankton.

Bacterioplankton occupy a range of ecological niches in aquatic systems.

It feeds directly on minute phytoplankton, thereby using the primary production energy that the phytoplankton originally derived from the sun in order to sustain their pelagic (open ocean) life cycle.

Bacterioplankton refers to the bacterial component of the plankton that drifts in the water column.

Diatoms are a major group of algae, and are among the most common types of phytoplankton.

They are transparent planktonic animals, generally less than in body length (excluding the tail).

And yet, if you look at whale sharks, which is the other plankton eating large shark, its diversity is much greater.

Coccolithophores are some of the most abundant marine phytoplankton, especially in the open ocean and are extremely abundant as microfossils.

The lake water is fresh, with a low transparency of about 2.5 m due to plankton and suspended sediments caused by the river flow.

Planktonic forms in open water usually rely on turbulent mixing of the upper layers by the wind to keep them suspended in sunlit surface waters.

And fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals, fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom and there's your pea soup.

The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton, and those PCBs, being fat soluble, accumulate in these dolphins.

In 2002, in the central Pacific gyre, there were found to be six kilograms (kg) of plastic for every kilogram of plankton near the surface.

We see the base of the food chain, the plankton, the small things, and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid, and on so up this diagram.

It is generally accepted that oil is formed mostly from the carbon rich remains of ancient plankton after exposure to heat and pressure in the Earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years.

The findings were unexpected as it was previously believed that the plankton grows only after the seasonal ice melt, yet some algae was discovered under several metres of intact sea ice.

And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zoo plankton feeding on all that life.

Research vessels a fisheries research vessel (FRV) requires platforms which are capable of towing different types of fishing nets, collecting plankton or water samples from a range of depths, and carrying acoustic fish finding equipment.

This phase of the Kaplan Project addresses its second objective, which is to investigate and study disturbance and recolonization processes at the sea floor following mining track creation and plume resedimentation in the abyssal nodule provinces.

The chalk itself's composed by plankton which has fallen down from the sea surface onto the sea floor, so that 90 percent of the sediment here is skeleton of living stuff, and then you have that millimeter thick red layer, and then you have black rock.

But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near shore ecosystem.

__TOC__ Fisheries research Fisheries research vessels (FRVs) require platforms which are capable of towing different types of fishing nets, collecting plankton or water samples from a range of depths, and carrying acoustic fish finding equipment.

So you have this little algal forest, and in the size of a laptop you can find more than 100 species of algae, mostly microscopic fit hundreds of species of little animals that then feed the fish, so that the system recovers.