More details about how Marine Biology articles will be organised.
Marine Life
The article about Marine Plant Life follows logically from Marine Animal Life, and gives the same kind of brief introduction to the scope of the subject. Again I intend to deal with individual species and groups in more detail later, but if you would like me to cover any particular type of marine plant sooner rather than later you could email me or join in the discussion ‘Article Requests’. (I have already touched on the ‘symbiotic algae’ in Warmer Seas – where the small plants that live within coral tissues are mentioned - but I will return to this topic later, when I look at the Giant Clams.)
Oceanography
I have tried to show how the almost invisible plants of the open ocean can sustain such an enormous amount of animal life. When I deal with ocean currents I will go on to explain why certain regions are much more productive than others – why, for example, the seas off the west coast of South America are so bountiful.
Marine Habitats
Some of the larger plants (such as the eelgrasses) can be extremely important as ‘critical habitats’ for certain animals, and I will deal with some of these in the ‘Marine Habitats’ section.
Marine Conservation
In this section I will discuss particular issues, attempting to explain the problems and show what is being done (or could be done) to mitigate them. For example the issues surrounding fish farming. (An earlier article about the effects of salmon farming on wild salmon populations could equally have been published here.)
