Excerpt from Science Progress in the Twentieth Century, 1909: A Quarterly Journal of Scientific Work Thought
In a recent number of this journal I reviewed a series of memoirs on general marine physiology, the results of which were: (1) that the density of both animal and vegetable life is greater in the polar and temperate than in the equatorial and sub-tropical seas; (2) that these variations in the density of life in the sea are to be associated with variations in the abundance of certain "ultimate food-stuffs," probably ammonia and nitric acid salts, soluble silicic acid, and phosphates; and (3) that the variations in the abundance of the first of these inorganic food-salts depend upon the activity of certain forms of marine bacteria, which possess the power of reducing nitric to nitrous acid, nitrous acid to ammonia, and the latter to elementary nitrogen. These bacteria are more active at the temperature of tropical than that of temperate seas, and in polar waters their activity is practically inhibited. Thus in the warmer seas a certain proportion of the ultimate food-stuffs available for the nutrition of the organisms of the vegetable plankton is, so to speak, thrown out of circulation; and to that extent these waters are biologically impoverished. There is actual experimental evidence for all these conclusions.
It is assumed, in such a discussion, that there is a general distinction between two categories of organisms in the sea: (1) the "producers," alg?, diatoms, other protophyta, and those unicellular organisms which have a plant-like or holophytic mode of nutrition. These organisms, by virtue of the power of photo-synthesis which they possess, can elaborate starch from carbon dioxide and water, and proteid from the carbohydrate so formed and the nitrogenous food-substances absorbed by them from their medium. Then we have (2) the "consumers," the marine vertebrata and invertebrata, as well as many of the protozoa. We usually speak of the consumers as "animals."
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