September 18th, 2013 § § permalink
Plankton is a lot like high school. Individuals find themselves tossed into a motley group of assorted creatures headed in the same direction. (Stay with me here.) They might not have anything much in common – they might be different sizes, eat different things, and perform vastly different roles in the ecosystem. Sometimes they are diverse; sometimes they are homogeneous (like during an algal bloom). Yet there they are, bound together in the Plankton Class of 2013.
Experts talk about this slippery set using terms such as “guild”, “ecological group” and “functional type”. These groupings are not necessarily related to taxonomic or physiological closeness, but might throw a lasso around a particular activity the plankton are involved in, such as the cycling of carbon and nutrients in the ocean.
Just like your friends from high school, individual plankton might veer off to become wildly different in their adult forms. They might cycle for generations in local waters while others are drawn off into distant carbon sinks. If only they had some form of Facebook to keep in touch…
August 13th, 2013 § § permalink
You will have to pardon me. I am exhausted. Constant motion, especially of the self-propelled variety, will wear out even the most skilled of the wanderly types. This summer I have been restoring a boat, running an org, being a daughter, navigating my relationship with a madman, imitating an oceanography student and pulling up stakes/growing new roots willy-nilly.
When I started imagining a life afloat, I assumed that along with the requisite level of letting go would come a certain tranquility.
This is our boat, and it is literally named Tranquility. C’mon!
Blair Niles (1880-1959), renown female expeditionist, travel author, and founding member of The Society of Woman Geographers, said of her life en route, “You are never tired, never bored. You feel as if you could go on living forever, as if you had just touched the fringe of what you want to do.” With respect, Ms. Niles, I contend, O rly?
I find myself wondering, here on the red-eye bus from NYC to Fairhaven, MA, do plankton ever rest? Do the dinoflagellates ever toggle off their bioluminescence and just power down? Do the copepods curl up under a bit of kelp and call it a night? Is there a state of being that is even more laissez–faire than floating along with the whims of density, temperature and wind?
Box jellies are known to feed during the day, and appear to rest on the sea floor at night. There is some debate over if this can be truly considered “sleep”, since the big brain humanoids associate sleep with changes in brain activity, and box jellies don’t have proper brains. (Lucky!, I exclaim, spitting out some soup.)
Shivering on an over-air conditioned bus, surrounded by snore sounds and too-loud headphones (You’ll get tinnitus like that!), I am left to ponder what you can let go of even after you let everything go.
Did I miss a spot?
August 7th, 2013 § § permalink
Beebe peeps out from the bathysphere.
In 1934, Otis Barton and Will Beebe set a diving record in a small spherical bathysphere, descending to 3,028 feet. They were pioneers even in today’s context, the first to make direct observations of deep sea wildlife, a realm that remains largely unexplored.
From the small metal orb, Beebe described the appearance of, among many other things, “marine snow”.
Marine snow (also, “sea snow”) is comprised of the falling bits of debris, dead plankton, fecal matter and miscellany that aggregate and sink down into the briny deep. Sea snow delivers the sun energy that is initially captured in the top layers of the ocean (for example, by algae running photosynthesis) into the darkness. This is a prime mechanism of “vertical transport” that sustains deep-sea consumers who might never see the light of day.
Today, scientists attempt to quantify and characterize the snow, as well as the branches of the food web that graze upon it.
