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A Sea of Microbes: What’s So Special about Marine Microbiology

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The Marine Microbiome

Part of the book series: The Microbiomes of Humans, Animals, Plants, and the Environment ((MHAPE,volume 3))

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Abstract

This chapter investigates what justifies marine microbiology as a discipline in its own right. Do marine microorganisms really exist? And if so, what distinguishes them from freshwater- or terrestrial microorganisms, or from microorganisms living in any other specialized habitat? The marine environment—particularly the ocean—is the largest continuous habitat on Earth. This makes the ocean different in terms of scale and sharing space and nutrients, as well as in terms of the distribution, dispersal, and encounters of microorganisms that inhabit it. The ocean comprises a large variety of confined sub-habitats. It has an impact on the function of the planet Earth as a whole. A critical property of seawater is that it contains a large amount of salt and that this requires microorganisms that live in it are able to adjust their osmotic pressure. The marine microbiome is composed of the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, as well as viruses, all of which in dazzling numbers and diversity. All of the known microbial lineages are represented and many are exclusively found in the ocean and there is little doubt that life originated in the ocean.

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  1. Department of Freshwater and Marine Ecology – IBED, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Lucas J. Stal

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  1. Department of Freshwater and Marine Ecology – IBED, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Lucas J. Stal

  2. University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Mariana Silvia Cretoiu

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Stal, L.J. (2022). A Sea of Microbes: What’s So Special about Marine Microbiology. In: Stal, L.J., Cretoiu, M.S. (eds) The Marine Microbiome. The Microbiomes of Humans, Animals, Plants, and the Environment, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90383-1_1

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