Feed me. Feed me. Slippery fish. Travel up the food chain to become food for a flashing FISH.

Spread through the FOOD WEB.

Fish get their energy by consuming other organisms. Phytoplankton are food for zooplankton—tiny "wandering animals" eat tiny "wandering plants." In turn, they are consumed by bigger animals, which get eaten by bigger fish, and so on. Essential carbon compounds travel up the food chain serving both as nutrients providing metabolic energy, and as building blocks for biomass (animal bodies). Fish bodies are built as they grow from materials first made by plants.

BEGIN AS: Plant Biomass. BECOME: Animal Biomass.

Living organisms ingest other organisms as sources of energy in the food chain.

Learn much more with Wikipedia: Eating, Metabolism, Ocean_biomass, Food_web

Your work is done. Chill out. Relax. Bed-down. Settle into SEDIMENT!

Go through the process of DECOMPOSITION.

Dead ocean plants are broken up by microbes for energy. The remains may settle to the ocean floor, when they aren't fully consumed by deep sea animals or fully dissolved in the water along the way. If these bits reach the bottom, immense pressures from the column of water and the accumulating material above will crush them into sedimentary rock over long periods of time.

BEGIN AS: Plant Biomass. BECOME: Sedimentary Organic Matter.

C₆H₁₂O₆ => 2 C₂H₅OH + 2 C0₂

Sugar => Ethanol + Carbon Dioxide

Complex organic molecules are broken down to simpler forms in the process of decomposition.

Learn much more with Wikipedia: Decomposition, Sedimentation

start over

You are Carbon in a Marine Plant

We may be microscopic, but we pack a powerful punch. Half of the photosynthesis on earth? Anchor of aquatic food chains? Not a problem. We do it as we drift about.

Too small to be seen by the naked human eye, phytoplankton—meaning, "wandering plants"—live at the sunlit surface of almost all bodies of water. Like plants on land, phytoplankton are self-feeding—"autotrophs"—that create their own food. Through photosynthesis, these primary producers are key starting points of the aquatic food chains, synthesizing organic compounds from carbon dioxide suspended in the ocean.

Thousands of different species of plankton trap enough energy from the sun to build a great blue whale. Algae, kelp, and phytoplankton are the primary producers of the water-ways. They produce all the food, themselves, that every other marine animal ultimately consumes.

Learn much more with Wikipedia: Phytoplankton, Autotroph

glucose, DNA, Amino Acid, ATP, a protein, an enzyme, RNA, a starch, carbonate, complex carbohydrate, lipid, nucleic acid