Crossword-Solution: NEKTON 6 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

What is more interesting at sea than the charts of ocean depths, currents, winds, salinity, and temperature! If you go too fast to touch on Plankton, Nekton, and Benthos, at least let the poor first class passengers have a compass, if not a barograph and a thermometer, to eke out conversations on the weather, the day's run, and bridge.

The vast meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of organisms microscopic, form a layer for hundreds of feet beneath the surface and on which the great herbivora feed; and on these animals the legions of the carnivora subsist.

Such natural changes include spatial and temporal trends or cycles in the physical (temperature, tides, currents, turbidity, etc.), chemical (salinity, dissolved gases, inorganic/organic substances--nutrients, etc.) or biological (primary productivity, zooplankton, nekton, benthic species, predators, etc.) properties or characteristics of the waters within and outside the Bay.