phytoplankton

(Newser) - Whales are actually cash cows, or so suggest economists with the International Monetary Fund. A team helmed by Ralph Chami took a look at the economic benefit provided by whales when it comes to carbon sequestration and ecotourism and arrived at a big figure: $2 million apiece. Their analysis hasn'...

(Newser) - Scientists studying algae for NASA have discovered it in the most unusual of places: beneath the Arctic ice, reports AFP . What's more, there's a lot of it, defying the conventional belief that it couldn't grow there because there was too little light. The discovery, outlined in the...

(Newser) - Melting Arctic ice has spurred tiny organisms in the region to bloom far earlier, a study suggests—a shift which could have disastrous results for the entire Arctic ecosystem. Phytoplankton are at the root of the food web there: zooplankton subsist on them, fish eat the zooplankton, birds eat the...

(Newser) - Rising sea temperatures are killing phytoplankton, the microscopic organisms that feed the lower rungs of the food chain in the world's oceans and create much of our oxygen, scientists say. Researchers at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia used a combination of old records and newer satellite images to determine a...