Sea butterfly

Chapter 19: Sea butterfly

page 285: the oceans have absorbed...much of the additional heat. See Missing heat found in oceans, global warming has accelerated in past 15 years

page 285: change in ocean acidity.  A recent report here. And Julia Whitty summarizes ten key findings.

page 286: in addition to cyanobacteria, most known species of bacterial plankton can be found everywhere. 

page 287: diatoms...years of study and appreciation.  Mary E. Harrington wrote a poem to Gonyaulax polyedra.

page 293: [apparent] reduction in the worldwide primary productivity of phytoplankton. Further research includes an ambitious new global survey.

page 293: plastic.  Plastic fragments are killing sperm whales and other species.

Image from Planktonology.

P.S. 14 May: Amazing sea butterflies are the ocean's canary in a coal mine.


This is the twentieth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Sea butterfly

Twenty-eighth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 19: Sea butterfly

page 285: implications. Now real-world observations.

page 288/9: Diatom names. A longer list of amazing names at 100 Diatom Greats.

page 291: millions and millions of [tiny] shells. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes:

The atomizing of things extends also to the visible aspects of the world, and it is here that Lucretius is at his best as a poet: the little motes of dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight in a dark room, the miniscule shells, all similar but each one different, that waves caste up on the bibula harena, the imbibing sand.

page 293: reduction in...primary productivity of phytoplankton. A brief explainer of the 2010 paper by Boyce et al behind this claim is here. It was also suggested that global warming was likely to reduce phytoplankton size. Recent research suggests that warmer future oceans could cause phytoplankton to thrive near the poles but shrink in the tropics.

page 293: plastic...particles are now everywhere, including the Southern Ocean. See this or this. On marine plastics (and everything about the oceans) read the magnificent but disturbing book Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts.

Ocean acidification: 'a stealth asteroid of environmental change'

Planktonic forams floating in the upper levels of the oceans sequester about one quarter of all carbonate produced in the oceans each year.

-- from Nature's Masons by Sean B. Caroll

Plankton dreams

A good short movie



Hat tip Grrlscientist.

Evidence that plankton numbers have declined steeply in recent decades is debated. But the evidence that they will fall in the future as the oceans warm is strong.

Plankton-related posts on this blog include: The power of plankton, Mobile marine reserves, Plankton Chronicles, Big World, Touching the world ocean, Dancing and The numberless goings-on of life...

Dr Astroumoff's fabulous flying copepods

Ed Yong explains:

One group of copepods, the pontellids, are found throughout the topmost waters. They tend to be more brightly coloured than other transparent members of the group. It’s thought that the colours help to reflect harmful ultraviolet radiation, but they could make the copepods more conspicuous to fish. Copepods escape from fish with powerful bursts of speed that propel them through the water. But those same movements can send them flying too... 

... Their powerful escape reflex provides a lot of energy, but they lose anywhere from 58 to 88 per cent of that as they break the water surface. By contrast, a flying fish loses less than 0.1 per cent with the same manoeuvre. This is because the surface tension of water is much more important to a small animal than a big one... Still, their ‘flights’ are substantial. Each copepod is around 3 millimetres long, but their leaps carried them over an average distance of 80 millimetres. That’s well beyond their own body length. It’s also at least 3 times greater than the length of the pursuing mullet, and further than the fish can actually see. And the longest jumpers even managed to cover 170mm. 

...[and] despite the energy needed to leave the water, the copepods travel so far in the air that they recoup their initial losses. To travel the same distance underwater, they would need to spend 20 times more energy.

'The power of plankton'

The more we learn, the more questions we have. Some of the questions are in the realm of basic biology. What evolutionary processes maintained such an extraordinary diversity of microbial species? Have microorganisms that play key biogeochemical roles gone undiscovered?...

...Then there are the practical questions. As humanity pumps nitrogen into the oceans and carbon into the atmosphere, causing dead zones and disrupting the climate, how long can phytoplankton keep cleaning up our mess? Can we enlist phytoplankton genes to make hydrocarbons so we no longer have to drill for oil?...

...Ultimately, the microorganisms in the ocean will survive, as they have for billions of years, and they will help restore Earth to a biogeochemical steady state. If we can understand them better, perhaps we can help them help humanity survive as well.

 --  from an overview by Paul Falkowski of discoveries as to the nature and role of phytoplankton in Earth system.

Falkowski thinks that event in the best case it will take a long time — probably about 1,000 years — for the current damage being caused by humans to be reversed:

The phytoplankton will survive, but humans are going to pay the price. I find it very discouraging that a large segment of US society is not accepting conclusions that are based on objective science. It's distressing because everybody seems to be their own climate expert. I don't think humans realize that we're a vulnerable species.