The Plankton Food‐Web Role in the Oceans

Abstract

Abstract Plankton are organisms not able to swim against water currents. They live in every aquatic environment and stand at the base of food webs and biogeochemical cycles on our planet. Plankton include prokaryotes (unicellular organisms without a nucleus), protists, and protozoans (unicellular eukaryotes or organisms with a proper nucleus) and metazoans (multicellular eukaryotes). These groups feature a huge biological diversity, which cascades into a myriad of different sizes, forms, behaviors, and, ultimately, roles played in aquatic ecosystems. The interaction of different plankton species produce complex ecological networks encompassing multiple feeding connections, or trophic links. The complexity of interactions among plankton is an emergent property whose investigation is made possible by ecological‐network models. Long‐term ecological research programs aiming at assessing ocean health can profit from these modeling tools to integrate (i) plankton biodiversity explorations and (ii) the search for the role played by the entangled plankton webs in the functioning of our planet's largest environment, i.e. the ocean.