15: Ocean Ecosystems
- Page ID
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CC9 The Global Greenhouse Effect: Perhaps the greatest environmental challenge faced by humans is the prospect that major climate changes may be an inevitable result of our burning fossil fuels. The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere where they accumulate and act like the glass of a greenhouse trapping more of the sun’s heat.
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CC14 Phototrophy, Light, and Nutrients: Phototrophy (which includes photosynthesis) and chemosynthesis are two processes by which simple chemical compounds are made into the organic compounds of living organisms. Photosynthesis depends on the availability of carbon dioxide, light, and certain dissolved nutrient elements including nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron. Chemosynthesis does not use light energy, but instead depends on the availability of chemical energy from reduced compounds, which occur only in limited environments where oxygen is depleted.
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CC16 Maximum Sustainable Yield: The maximum sustainable yield is the maximum biomass of a fish species that can be depleted annually by fishing but that can still be replaced by reproduction. This yield changes unpredictably from year to year in response to the climate and other factors. The populations of many fish species worldwide have declined drastically when they have been overfished (beyond their maximum sustainable yield) in one or more years when that yield was lower than the average annual yield on which most fisheries management is based.
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CC17 Species Diversity and Biodiversity: Biodiversity is an expression of the range of genetic diversity; species diversity; diversity in ecological niches and types of communities of organisms (ecosystem diversity); and diversity of feeding, reproduction, and predator avoidance strategies (physiological diversity), within the ecosystem of the specified region. Species diversity is a more precisely-defined term and is a measure of the species richness (number of species) and species evenness (extent to which the community has balanced populations with no dominant species). High diversity and biodiversity are generally associated with ecosystems that are resistant to change.
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CC18 Toxicity: Many dissolved constituents of seawater become toxic to marine life when the concentrations go above their natural amount. Some synthetic organic chemicals are especially significant because they are persistent and may be bioaccumulated or biomagnified.
The term ecosystem encompasses both living organisms and the physical environment of a particular volume of space. Within the ecosystem, the components and characteristics of the living and nonliving environment are interdependent, each influencing the other. Hence, conceptually the global environment can be broken down into separate ecosystems within which the species that are present, the physical environment, and the relationships among the species and with their environment are distinct and different from those in adjacent areas. For example, we can define each geographically distinct coral reef as a separate ecosystem. However, all coral reef ecosystems have common characteristics in terms of the types of organisms they sustain, their physical environment, and processes driven by biological–physical interactions. These common characteristics are different from those of other ecosystems, such as mangrove swamps, the rocky intertidal zone, and the open-ocean photic zone.
This chapter briefly reviews several ocean ecosystems, emphasizing the relationship between their individual physical environmental conditions and their biological communities. However, the classification of separate ecosystems in the oceans is not precise. In reality, all such ecosystems are linked and interdependent.