Sentences with phrase «base of the food chain»

«Asian carp, in particular bighead and silver carp [such as the one caught in June], feed on the small food items at the very base of the food chain.

Most producers need sunlight to make food, and consumers are dependent on producers to provide the base of the food chain in

Use of herbicides also eliminates larval and pollinator host plants, transforming the base of food chains.

Selenium is an essential part of certain enzymes and proteins for a broad range of organisms, from the sunlight - harvesting phytoplankton at the base of the food chain to the vertebrates that ultimately depend on them (such as the marine reptile Lariosaurus, shown, whose group died out with many others about 201 million years ago).

«Jeff, who used his plant growth chambers as a time machine to test the potential of a hypothesis about what may have happened 252 million years ago, provides an excellent example illustrating how the slowly unfolding extinction on land over maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of years may have been caused by reproductive troubles at the base of the food chain.»

As well as being vital to climate control, it also creates enough oxygen for every other breath we take, and forms the base of the food chain for fisheries so it is incredibly important for food security.

Researchers find trouble among phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, which has implications for the marine food web and the world's carbon cycle

Studies of streams and rivers in California, Texas and Illinois suggest that the pesticides might be wiping out small organisms that live in the waterways and form the base of the food chain.

Experiments show that microscopic ocean plants and animals — the base of the food chain — will be impacted

«We're hammering fish from the top down and now from the bottom up as more acidic oceans erode the base of the food chain,» Cowen says.

The phytoplankton (microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain) «fix» nitrogen in the shallow, sunlit waters of the ocean, and then as they die and sink, nitrogen is eliminated (a process known as «denitrification») in dark, oxygen - poor pockets of the ocean depths.

It is at the base of the food chain for these seafloor oases.

In a process called upwelling, those cold waters normally bring up the nutrients that feed the tiny organisms, which form the base of the food chain.

But the less aesthetically pleasing invertebrates also play crucial roles in the base of the food chain, in nutrient recycling, energy flow, and so on.

Plants form the basis of the food chains and are consumed by herbivores, which in turn serve as prey for the carnivores.

In the long term, screwing with the base of the food chain and the oxygen cycle potentially threatens the entire dynamic of life on Earth.

Because these organisms are the basis of the food chain, that means more food for fish and, ultimately, the animals that feed on fish (as long as they don't depend on sea ice to do it — like polar bears who use the ice as a hunting platform).

The base of their food chain was not plants that captured the energy of the sun but chemosynthetic bacteria that captured the energy of the volcano.

These tiny organisms account for about 10 % of all photosynthesis on Earth, which forms the base of the food chain and provides the atmosphere with oxygen.

The invasive fiber - like red seaweeds (Dasysiphonia japonica) had covered up to 90 percent of some areas, altering the visual landscape, and the newly created habitat structure now supported two to three times more small creatures at the base of the food chain.

These have provided insight into the roles that marine bacteria, archaea, viruses and eukaryotic microbes have as global primary producers that provide nutrition at the base of the food chain; remineralization (the transformation of organic molecules into inorganic forms); and the deposition of carbon on the sea floor.

By harvesting the energy of the Sun and converting it to their tissues, phytoplankton form the basis of the food chain in the ocean.

The microbes (bacteria and Archaea) which form the base of the food chain are chemosynthetic, using energy from hydrogen sulfide in the vent fluid, and oxygen and carbon dioxide from the seawater, to create simple sugars.

The flourishing of some species at the expense of others causes major species shifts at the base of the food chain, with likely consequences higher up the trophic web up to the fishes.

The pulses of silt, mud and gravel make streams murkier and limit growth of aquatic plants at the base of the food chain.

Phytoplankton forms the base of the food chain, providing food for thousands of oceanic species.

Under those conditions the shells of many marine organisms would dissolve, including those at the base of the food chain.

Green plants are at the base of the food chain.

«These are the oceanic areas where food is most abundant, and it's driven by high primary productivity at the base of the food chain — these areas are the savanna grasslands of the sea,» say co-authors and project originators Barbara Block of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station and Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

We don't have good information on the base of the food chain for most of the past — that's just «noise» but now that we start having ways to track trends in primary productivity — what's being made out of sunlight, water and CO2, by which organisms, and how fast do their populations change (remembering that some plankton populations turn over a new generation in a couple of weeks so relative numbers of different species can change that fast across the oceans).

This pollution is impacting our marine ecosystems, wildlife such as seabirds, dolphins, fish, and turtles, and plastic fragments are even displacing plankton at the base of the food chain.

«These fish have an important role in the food chain because they connect plankton at the base of the food chain with higher levels.

-- «They are the base of the food chain... if there's no plankton, there's no fish in the oceans... And they take CO2 out of the atmosphere by taking it into the interior of the ocean where it can be stored for thousands of millions of years so they're an essential buffer against climate change due to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere»

However, rising levels do acidify the oceans, [and] phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, grow less well in [those] conditions.

We're losing species and losing populations, partly by climate change and partly by habitat change, partly by overexploitation of habitat like fisheries... We've lost about 40 % of the phytoplankton in the oceans which is the basis of the food chain.»

Calcium forming organisms like shellfish, snails and microscopic plankton, which are at the base of the food chain, react sensitively to ocean acidification.

«This important expedition focuses on polar latitudes, where the acidification effects can cascade from microscopic organisms up to our economy, as the organisms at risk form the base of the food chain for some of the world's most productive fisheries.»

As if rising sea levels aren't enough to worry about, U.S. Geological Survey scientists say melting glaciers may also adding significant amounts of carbon to the oceans, where it's readily available to microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain.