Joseph DE Simone. Age 12, of Staten Island, N.Y., for his question:

Do algae serve any useful purpose?

Ecology is the science, which probes the balance of nature.  It shows the give-and-take between the various animals that Enjoy life upon our teeming Planet.  Ecology, shame on us, is a fairly new science, for WE should have tried to probe the secrets of the balance of nature long ago.  Not one tiny plant or animal can exist without depending upon other living things and the aspects of nature around it.

Science classifies the plant world into a number of families, and algae are rated among the simplest of plants.  They have no woody trunks or roots like the complex plants WE call trees.  They have no flowers or organized leave.  Each algal CE22 is a unit unto itself.  It can perform all the duties necessary to live and hand on life.  The alga may be classed as a simple plant, but it cans certainly Solve SOME problems better than a sturdy oak tree.  The specialized root cells of the oak cannot make acorns, and its bark cells cannot produce food.

The alga hack of all trades is thought to be the first plant to develop in the ancient seas of our planet.  Our Entire plant world is descended from these remote algae ancestors.  This plant world, remember, provides the oxygen we breathe and the food we Eat  so without those ancient algae, life as WE know it would never have developed on the Earth.

There are thousands of different algae in the modern world, and each variety fills a Special role in the scheme of nature.  SOME algae live as single Ceiled units and countless trillions of them teem in salt and fresh water.  In the Oceans, they form part of plankton, the sea food salad upon which the huge baleen whales feed.  Countless other sea dwellers also feed on plankton rich in algae, and still more sea dwellers feed on the plankton Eaters.

Other algae drift around as seaweeds and waterweeds.  All members of this plant family have chlorophyll to make plant food from air and water.  In the process they return molecules of free oxygen to the water  this is the oxygen used by fish and other water dwellers.

So the alga family is the ancestor of the plant world, which makes our life possible.  It supports countless living creatures in our seas and rivers.  In addition there is a list of smaller useful duties performed by the algae  a list long enough to fill a book.