About zooplankton
Practically every major group of animals, free swimming or bottom settlers, have plankton-like representatives. The term plankton is applied to all those organisms, which live freely in the water and are more or less passively drifted by water currents. The animals are heterotrophic, without photosynthesis, and live on other living organisms or dead organic material. In the open water masses both the blue-green bacteria and the plankton-algae are nourishment to the animals. Often the small animals have their own special collecting tools to catch the small cells. The most very small animals live of dead organic material (called detritus), virus, bacteria and single cells of algae. Some are living totally or partial of smaller zooplankton or also of organisms of their own specie.
In our connection, where we only presents some examples of zooplankton, we separates the plankton into only three groups;
- Wheel-animals from freshwater
- Water-flies from freshwater and salt water
- Copepoda from fresh and salt water.
- Larvae plankton is the collection of sea-animals with plankton larvae.
Index