Word: plankton
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...spectacular alewife "die-offs" in recent years, but they still have conflicting theories about the cause of the phenomenon. Some believe that alewives head for shallow coastal waters in such great numbers every spring that they exhaust the oxygen supply in their immediate vicinity and suffocate. Others suggest that plankton-tiny water plants and animals on which alewives feed-suddenly begin dying just as the fish are crowding into coastal waters in the spring. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Biologist Melvin Greenwood theorizes that the alewives are killed by sudden temperature drops caused by violent spring storms that drive colder waters...
...year future, scientists are already busy with new ways to feed the hungry planet. Los Angeles' Rand Corp. feels confident that fish will be herded like cattle and raised in offshore pens, that kelp, seaweed, plankton and microscopic sea plants will be grown by divers living for months at a time in undersea bunkhouses. Oilmen have lately discovered how to derive a high-grade, edible protein from petroleum. The U.S. Army has figured out how to irradiate meats to preserve them for three years-a development of vast potential for refrigeration-shy countries. Would people eat such stuff? Happily...
...Visitors. A lake dies of eutrophication, or quite simply over-nourishment. With or without humans, accumulations of sewage draining its way through the earth feeds a lake with nitrate and phosphate nutrients, the baby food of algae and plankton. Gingerly tugging the shore line at first, these willowy green growths are the stuff that giant, billowing swamps are later made of. After a few centuries or a millennium, a meadow sits where a lake once sparkled. In his wanton, willful way, man can speed up this process to mere decades...
...homicide has a ham in it. While the police fumble, she marshals vast jowls behind a mouth jutted into a small downturned crescent of incontestable certainty, or inhales all the air in her immediate vicinity, then slowly lets it go again, sifting for clues the way a whale sifts plankton. At last, face to face with a remorseless killer, she plucks a dainty pistol from her gown and remarks: "I should warn you, I won the ladies' small-arms championship." Rutherford fans are aware by now that every Murder will out more or less the same...
...surface world. Jewel-bright sea creatures hover outside the glass windows, coolly observing behavior in the manfish bowl. When divers venture into the abysmal blue depths to explore, they come upon sharks, barracuda, and marine life hitherto unheard of-all recorded in skillful underwater photography that magnifies even minute plankton into glittering monstrosities...