• Question: What is the most common food for animals in the sea to eat and if you do know, why?

    Asked by deboraheg to Clare, Dave, Glo, Ozge, Sean on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Dave Sproson

      Dave Sproson answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I don’t really know – though I’d take a guess at the tiny plants and animals that make up the phyto- and zooplankton. I’m sure one of the biologists can be more specific/accurate!

    • Photo: Gloeta Massie

      Gloeta Massie answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I was just about to say plankton, too. Plankton is basically anything that floats around without much control of its direction (although it doesn’t have to be tiny! If you toss a person into the water in water wings, and she can’t swim – she’s PLANKTON!). Plankton is the base of the entire oceanic food pyramid. 🙂

    • Photo: Ozge Ozkaya

      Ozge Ozkaya answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Krill! and yes Plakton is a good guess because krill is classified as plankton and I am sorry it has a lot of control of it’s direction!!! 😉 Krill is the largest animal biomass on earth and is estimated to be at 500 million tonnes!!

    • Photo: Clare Woulds

      Clare Woulds answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      If you think about food chains and pyramids of numbers inecosystems, then most thing eat plants. Most ‘plants’ in the ocean are tiny single celled algae that form part of the plankton. Plankton is actually anything that floats around without swimming, and includes animals that eat algae too. The fancy name for algae or plant plankton is ‘phytoplankton’, and that’s the most popular diet in the ocean. Even the animals that I study in the mud on the seafloor eat phytoplankton, they just have to wait for it to die and sink down to them.

    • Photo: Sean Clement

      Sean Clement answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Definitely Plankton! It’s tiny and some groups of it or ‘blooms’ as they’re known can cover huge areas of ocean and can be seen from space like this bloom off the southwest coast of the UK:

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