Phytoplankton are microscopic plants floating around in marine and aquatic ecosystems that produce 50-80% of the world’s oxygen. Besides providing food for countless other organisms, they are so ...

Although these microscopic organisms are among the ocean’s smallest, their “blooms” are often visible from space. Phytoplankton are critical to making the planet livable and contribute to the global ...

The warming of the waters off the East Coast has come at an invisible, but very steep cost — the loss of microscopic organisms that make up the base of the ocean's food chain. The growing warmth and ...

Scientists have shown that the motility of phytoplankton also helps them determine their fate in ocean turbulence. Tiny ocean plants, or phytoplankton, were long thought to be passive drifters in the ...

Plankton are a collection of tiny organisms that live at and beneath the surface of lakes, rivers, ponds, and oceans across the planet. They’re named for the Greek word planktos, meaning to drift or ...

A new study estimates that oceanic phytoplankton generate about five times the annual total energy consumption of humans. Florida State University Professor William Dewar calculated the amount of ...

When we recently heard about a "huge" find made by Sharyn Hedrick, a phytoplankton taxonomist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, we wanted to see it—except ...

SEATTLE (AP) — For decades, scientists believed Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant phytoplankton on Earth, would thrive in a warmer world. But new research suggests the microscopic ...

A rapid loss of phytoplankton threatens to turn the western Indian Ocean into an “ecological desert,” a new study warns. The research reveals that phytoplankton populations in the region fell an ...