In the astonishing world of plankton, bright pink, micron-sized dinoflagellates looking like spaceships glide slowly over the surface of the sea; beautiful, flute-like tintinnids exchange genes temporarily with each other; and slender chaetognatha, or arrow worms, bristle with hairs and become cannibals as they gobble up their relatives.
These and a million other mostly microscopic planktonic species of viruses, microbes, larvae and eukaryotes are the largely invisible origins of life, the very bottom of the food chain and the enablers of all existence. Together, these tiny, single-cell life forms that drift on the upper layer of the oceans produce half our oxygen, act as carbon sinks, influence our weather and serve as the base of the ocean food web.
But while they may transform the ocean, the atmosphere and the terrestrial environment, they inhabit a world that is barely known and which has only recently been understood to be as complex and diverse as anything found in the rainforests.
Photo: AFP PHOTO HANDOUT/ NASA
‘DRIFTING WORLD’
Thanks to new photographic techniques derived from medical imagery and the ocean schooner Tara, which has spent years plying the oceans collecting plankton, we can now see the astonishing richness of what is known as the “drifting world.” It is, says Christian Sardet, co-founder of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the marine station of Villefranche-sur-Mer, even more extraordinary because this world of plankton represents all branches of the tree of life.
Sardet was a scientific co-ordinator of the Tara Oceans expedition, a three-year global voyage to all the world’s oceans to study plankton.
Photo: EPA/NIC BOTHMA
“My friend Eric Karsenti, a molecular biologist, suggested we should do a study of plankton. But I did not want to do hard science. I had to learn about plankton. For me, Tara was more of an exploration than a hard scientific expedition. Plankton have not really been explored,” he says.
He spent many weeks at sea, concentrating on filming and recording, but together the teams of zoologists, marine biologists and other scientists on the Tara took more than 35,000 samples from 200 locations.
Using different types of net they collected and sequenced nearly a billion genetic barcodes and discovered, at depths of up to 1,000 meters, unknown worlds of viruses, bacteria, worms, gelatinous creatures and strange photosynthetic organisms. Many had never been seen before or even imagined and the Tara expeditions have transformed the study of our oceans.
“Plankton are a huge range of sizes. They are very fragile. You have to collect them and photograph them in a day,” says Sardet. “I had a small laboratory on the Tara. New submersible cameras with micro lenses made it possible to film ocean life for the first time. I decided to film everything on black film to bring out the natural colors.
“Just as on land you have hotspots, places that are particularly rich and diverse. You may have a huge number of plankton in the Arctic, but the diversity there may be quite small and be dominated by a few species. In equatorial areas, just as on land, you have a huge diversity.”
CLIMATE CHANGE
Sardet’s book, called Plankton, merges science with art and illustrates what he calls “the irreplaceable beauty and diversity of planktonic life forms,” but it comes with a warning that the world’s oceans are being changed by climate change and acidification.
“Some data suggest phytoplankton have significantly declined in the world’s oceans over the past century,” he says. “On the other hand, some warm water predators such as jellyfish are thriving. Whether we are witnessing an actual global decline or massive changes in planktonic distribution will require more study. Certainly many species will be forced to adapt.
“We have modified the ecosystems by diminishing the big predators. No one knows if what man has done is reversible. We are closer to the start than to the end of what there is to know.”
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