10/28/2022
For today's , let's take a moment to learn about ocean productivity. ๐๐ฆ โ๏ธ "Ocean productivity" refers to the production of molecules by organisms in the water. Many of these molecules are the driving forces of life. For example, let's look at what phytoplankton does to contribute to ocean productivity. Phytoplankton are mostly microscopic organisms that undergo photosynthesis, but don't let their size fool you! It's estimated that around half of the air we breathe comes from these creatures! That's because phytoplankton takes CO2, a form of carbon unusable to us, and convert it into breathable oxygen and crucial organic carbon. Organic carbon is useful to all life, as it can be used to build essential molecules such as lipids, fats, proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates. These are the very molecules life relies on! So what do phytoplankton need to do this job? Just like a house plant would get light, CO2, water, and nutrients from its caretaker, phytoplankton gets all of these ingredients in the ocean. The nutrients it needs include nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen sometimes needs to be converted into a usable form for the phytoplankton to use. This is where bacteria come into play! Some bacteria take nitrogen in a form useless to phytoplankton, and convert it into a usable form so that the phytoplankton can go about its life, creating molecules for us to use. So, as you may have gathered, ocean productivity fuels life in the ocean and even on the land! And whenever we eat fish, we are reaping the benefits of ocean productivity, consuming the molecules that bacteria and phytoplankton worked so hard to build :) Pretty magical if you ask me!!