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What is "plankton"

Crossword clues for plankton

plankton
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
plankton
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Against the pale background the plankton which swarmed on the surface were clearly visible.
▪ All creatures that live in the plankton have to devise means of staying afloat.
▪ Because the creatures of the plankton individually are small, they are not always visible to the naked eye.
▪ Cod, for instance, lay about nine million eggs into the plankton.
▪ Creatures that float near the surface of the seas are called plankton.
▪ The plankton, he said, produce natural chemicals whose effect is similar to that of oil on the water.
▪ The ocean had so much plankton in it that the sea itself had changed colour.
▪ Through most of the summer, then, the plankton in open ocean is gradually depleted.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Plankton

Plankton \Plank"ton\ (pl[a^][ng]k"t[o^]n), n. [NL., fr. Gr. plagto`n, neut. of plagto`s wandering, pla`zesqai to wander.] (Biol.) All the animals and plants, taken collectively, which live at or near the surface of salt or fresh waters. -- Plank*ton"ic, a.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
plankton

1891, from German Plankton (1887), coined by German physiologist Viktor Hensen (1835-1924) from Greek plankton, neuter of planktos "wandering, drifting," verbal adjective from plazesthai "to wander, drift," from plazein "to drive astray," from PIE root *plak- (2) "to strike, hit" (see plague (n.)). Related: Planktonic.

Wiktionary
plankton

n. a generic term for all the organisms that float in the sea. A single organism is known as a plankter

WordNet
plankton

n. the aggregate of small plant and animal organisms that float or drift in great numbers in fresh or salt water

Wikipedia
Plankton

Plankton (singular plankter) are a diverse group of organisms that live in the water column of large bodies of water and that cannot swim against a current. They provide a crucial source of food to many large aquatic organisms, such as fish and whales.

These organisms include drifting or floating bacteria, archaea, algae, protozoa and animals that inhabit, for example, the pelagic zone of oceans, seas, or bodies of fresh water. Essentially, plankton are defined by their ecological niche rather than any phylogenetic or taxonomic classification.

Though many planktonic species are microscopic in size, plankton includes organisms covering a wide range of sizes, including large organisms such as jellyfish.

Plankton (disambiguation)

Plankton is a generic term for many organisms that live in bodies of water.

Plankton may also refer to:

  • Aerial plankton, atmospheric analogue to oceanic plankton
  • Phytoplankton, the autotrophic component of the plankton community
  • Plankton (character), a character in the Nickelodeon cartoon show SpongeBob SquarePants
  • Plankton Man, the stage name of Mexican musician Ignacio Chavez
  • Plankton Records, label of Drottnar and other bands
Plankton (character)

Sheldon James Plankton, or simply Plankton, is a fictional character in the Nickelodeon animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants. Although usually an antagonist, he is frequently shown as a protagonist or an antihero. He is voiced by Mr. Lawrence and first appeared in the episode " Plankton!" on July 31, 1999. Plankton was created and designed by Stephen Hillenburg. The character has also appeared in video games and other merchandise based on the series.

Usage examples of "plankton".

The plankton must have entered the shaft through a fissure in the ice that allowed ocean water to seep in.

In this case, the plankton, having entered the shaft through a crack, suddenly found themselves in a primarily freshwater environment and bioluminesced in panic as the freshwater slowly killed them.

I ask why droves of alleged plankton decided to swim into this alleged crack?

The plankton may have been drawn instinctively toward the temporarily warmer environment in the shaft.

I mentioned on that program was a kind of plankton that gets frozen in the polar ice cap every winter, hibernates inside the ice, and then swims away every summer when the ice cap thins.

The saltwater ice would have melted, releasing the plankton from hibernation, and giving us a small percentage of salt mixed in the freshwater.

As convenient as frozen plankton would be for explaining this mysterious little phenomenon, I can guarantee there are no hidden networks of frozen plankton in this glacier.

Instinctively, Rachel knew that the presence of frozen plankton in the glacier beneath them was the simplest solution to the riddle.

If the glacier contained saltwater interstices filled with plankton, she would have seen them.

Tremendous blooms of plankton filled the waters, drinking the sunlight.

But even this far from the ground there was life: a thin ethereal plankton of insects and spiders, windblown.

So long as the wispy aerial plankton that fed him continued to drift up from the lands below, he prowled his thin niche untroubled.

The upper sunlit layers were thick with a rich algal plankton, a crowded microscopic ecology.

The plankton was like a forest in the ocean, but a forest stripped of the superstructure of leaves, twigs, branches, and trunks, leaving only the tiny green chlorophyll-bearing cells of the forest canopy floating in their nutrient-rich bath.

Jahna could not make out the tiny plankton that crowded the waters, but she could see the tiny fish and shrimplike creatures that fed on them.