The marine food web

Here you have a marine food web graphic representation using some of my drawings. Feel free to use it for teaching, although I would ask to mention the source and authorship.

The little blurry dots represent virus and bacteria. Given they feed at all levels of the food web I positioned them all around. I hope you like it. Phytoplankton are at the base of the food web, together with some small mixotrophs. Both are grazed by larger heterotrophic and mixotrophic protists, such as ciliates and dinoflagellates, but also by appendicularians. Copepods are one step above; although they graze on both large and small protists I kept them on an upper position on the food web. Above them, we have krill, whales and jellyfish. On top of that we have fish, and at the highest level of the food web we found sharks, although humans would be a perhaps more realistic end point for the food web.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: