Living Together: Rocky Intertidal Zone, The: Challenges and Adaptations
The intertidal zone contains a rich abundance of diverse organisms, despite a multitude of challenges, from pounding waves and temperature fluctuation to competition for scarce resources. Nonetheless, many organisms manage to not only survive but to...
Living Together: Symbiotic Relationships
The relationship between some of the algae and animals living in a coral reef is symbiotic, meaning the two species live together. Symbiotic relationships between residents of coral reefs or other communities can be mutually beneficial, but that is ...
Food for Thought: Primary Productivity and Global Geochemical Cycles
Thanks to recent breakthroughs in our ability to detect and analyze organisms much smaller than any studied in the past, scientists are now looking at a broad range of microbial life forms in the ocean. As part of this process, it's become much more...
Living Together: Marine Communities: Change and Bio-Diversity
For communities in the marine environment, change is an ongoing reality. Bio-diversity, which refers to the number of species and relative abundance of different species within a community, offers the best chance for community survival.
Survivors: Intertidal Zonation
An organism's preference for the habitat to which it is adapted creates a mosaic of similarly adapted organisms clumped in recognizable bands along the shore. This is a phenomenon known as intertidal zonation.
Building Blocks: Role of Evolution in Early Life
The ability to adapt to changing or difficult conditions is clearly necessary if an organism is to be biologically successful.
Life Goes On: Vertebrates: Marine and Terrestrial
Marine biologists informally classify marine animals into two large groups: invertebrates and vertebrates. Vertebrates have backbones, while invertebrates do not. There are far more invertebrates than vertebrates in the ocean, but the vertebrates-wh...
Survivors: Long-Term Survivors
Despite the challenges of long-term survival on Earth, some phyla-including sponges, jellyfish, arthropods and mollusks-have endured for hundreds of millions of years, even in the most extreme environments.
Survivors: Early Invertebrates
The first animals on Earth were invertebrates-animals without backbones-and they diversified rapidly in the geologic period known as the Cambrian.