This section contains 605 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
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As land-based creatures, we often underestimate how much of the Earth is water, and specifically salt-water. About 71% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, but the seas of the world comprise by far the greatest amount of inhabitable environment--about 300 times that of land. Small wonder that the waters from which life arose are teeming with a variety of environments and organisms.
The study of ocean organisms and their environment began about one hundred years ago when Karl Moebius, a fisheries biologist, recognized circumstances like an oyster bed as a natural entity, and proposed the word "biocoenosis." In about 1866 Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) developed the idea of ecology and ecosystems. Ecosystems in the ocean are quite varied, from estuaries to far off-shore regions, and from the surface to the cold, dark depths of the ocean. Oceanographers divide the ocean into zones based on these differences, and study the...
This section contains 605 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
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