Charles Darwin suspected something in the “clear blue water” of the ocean that was even smaller than the protozoa he could see under the microscope. “Today we know that every liter of ocean water is swarming with hundreds of millions of microorganisms,” explains marine researcher Rudolf Amann, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. His colleague Tobias Erb from the sister institute of terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg adds: “Although only micrometers in size, the microorganisms with their sheer number and high rate of metabolism have a strong impact on energy flow and biomass turnover in the oceans.”
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Source: Phys.org