plankton
part of speech
noun (plankton — uncountable)
meaning for a pupil
1) Plankton are tiny plants and animals that drift in the sea and in lakes, carried by the water; most are too small to see without a microscope. tree →
2) Plant plankton (phytoplankton) make food from sunlight and produce a large share of the oxygen we breathe; animal plankton (zooplankton) include tiny shrimps and baby fish. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons plankton come at the start of ocean food chains: plankton are eaten by small fish and krill, which are eaten by bigger fish, seals and penguins — and the biggest animal of all, the blue whale, eats mostly tiny krill. In environment lessons pupils learn that warming and polluted seas harm plankton. In a famous cartoon, Plankton is a tiny villain.
examples
- Plankton float in the ocean. tree →
- Many whales feed on tiny plankton and krill. tree →
- Plankton are at the bottom of the ocean food chain. tree →
- Phytoplankton make oxygen from sunlight. tree →
- We looked at plankton under the microscope. tree →
- The sea glowed at night because of special plankton. tree →
- Small fish eat plankton, and bigger fish eat the small fish. tree →
note
Uncountable in everyday use: «plankton», not «a plankton»; it can take a plural verb («plankton are») or singular («plankton is»). Plankton are not one species but many tiny living things. The word comes from Greek for «drifting».
In the corpora
- Whale poo spreads nutrients that feed plankton, and plankton makes much of Earth's oxygen.
- One drop of seawater can hold millions of viruses and bacteria and many plankton.
- Oil and gas come from tiny sea plankton buried in mud and slowly cooked by the heat underground.
- Oil and gas formed from tiny sea plankton buried in mud and cooked slowly underground.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «plankton» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.