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.