What I Learned About Plankton

• Plankton isn't a specific organism, instead it is a lot of organisms that are small floating plants and animals in the water.  I didn't know that this could also include animals that will later grow up to be fish or even crabs one day.
• I didn't know that jellyfish were a type of plankton before this week.  I guess that I just assumed they were some type of fish but never associated them with plankton.  It makes sense though because jellyfish don't actually swim, they drift with the ocean currents.
• Most of the world's oxygen and organic material is produced by phytoplankton.  I thought that over half of the earth's oxygen was produced by trees but in fact, 80% of our oxygen and 75-85% of our organic material is produced by phytoplankton.
• There are four different classifications of plankton according to size.  The classification goes in order of smallest to largest Nannoplankton, Microplankton, Macroplankton, and Megaplankton.  
• Another thing that I learned about plankton was that they outweigh all of the animals in the sea that aren't plankton.  Because there is so much plankton in the ocean, it amasses more weight that everything else in the ocean if it were to be combined.