Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 20 Issue 02

View Issue TOC
Volume 20, No. 2
Pages 28 - 33

OpenAccess

The Microbial Loop

By Lawrence R. Pomeroy , Peter J. leB. Williams , Farooq Azam, and John E. Hobbie  
Jump to
Citation Copyright & Usage
First Paragraph

Answering Charles Darwin’s prescient question has taken us nearly two centuries. Only in recent decades have methods and concepts been developed to explore the significance of microbes in the ocean’s web of life. Bacteria in aquatic ecosystems were first recognized for their role in the decomposition of organic material and the remineralization of inorganic nutrients, a role that only became fully accepted in the 1980s. Their importance as photosynthetic producers of organic matter became evident when so-called blue-green algae were acknowledged as being bacteria, and the microscopic cyanobacterium of the genus Synechococcus was discovered to be abundant in the oceans—particularly in the vast oligotrophic blue water where they are the dominant autotrophs.

Citation

Pomeroy, L.R., P.J. leB. Williams, F. Azam, and J.E. Hobbie. 2007. The microbial loop. Oceanography 20(2):28–33, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2007.45.

Copyright & Usage

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.