Martina Messioni
Appearances
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So, like, there's so many things that we don't know about phytoplankton. Specifically from Antarctica, like... how phytoplankton will behave with like changes in the environment. Then the diversity, like how diverse is phytoplankton? Like how many species are there? And I feel like year after year, there are more and more species coming through.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
And like the more that we get also into the genes of those specific species, the more that we learn that, oh, actually we have no idea what is going on there.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So phytoplankton, they depend on the sunlight to photosynthesize. You can find phytoplankton 60 meters below the water level, but the highest concentration of phytoplankton is always going to be like in the first few meters.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Yeah, I mean, we know how the glaciers are retreating. So like some studies that say like 80%, 87% of the glaciers that are in the Antarctic Peninsula are retreating. That means they're melting faster or they're not like growing or stable. But how much actual melt water it is in the ocean and how that melt water is affecting the communities is what we're trying to understand better.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So we collaborate with different tour vessel that go down to Antarctica from like November till March. So like a Southern summer months. So what we do is train those two guys that are going to be with different passengers to run the program where they're on board. Oh, wow. And so what happens is like when they're down in the peninsula, they have like a list of sites that they can go sample.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So when they're like, oh, tomorrow we're going to one of these sites and we want to do fear phyto. And so they have like a GPS location they can go. So they go down in like an inflatable boat with the kit for the sampling, like the instruments and the bottles and everything. A group of guests that are interested in helping gather the samples.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
And so they kind of like have a list of samples and data that they have to gather when they are there.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Yeah, I feel like it's very meaningful because the passengers, sometimes they didn't expect at all to go to Antarctica to do some science. And so when they're doing that, they're super excited. They didn't even think about that when they were like, you know, booking a vacation. And then most of that people have never heard, like, even the word fire plankton before.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So when you talk about, like, how whales depend on them, unlike penguins, which is actually what they wanted to see in Antarctica, whales and penguins. So when you talk about, like, whoa, the whales and penguins wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the fire plankton. I feel like that kind of blows their mind a little bit. And I think it adds a lot of value to their trip.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So first of all, we kind of like start like describing what happened in these places that the ships actually go. We have no idea what happened there. Like there was sometimes no description for the phytoplankton before. And we're also understanding better what happens through the whole season. So from November to March, it is a lot of information.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
They're the base of the food web in most of the ocean areas. And like our Earth is like 70% ocean. So everything that happens in the ocean relies on phytoplankton eventually.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
When you go with a research vessel, sometimes you go like a month or like two weeks or like very short periods of time. So you have sometimes one month of information from one year and then the next year they couldn't go on the same month. So you have another month. And so then you have to put it all together like a big puzzle.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So from this, we learned how these places were behaving, like, the whole summer. And then year after year, how that was changing.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
We gather different kind of samples. So one sample is for microscopy counting, and that's the sample that I or the people at the university where I work analyze. So what we do with that sample is like discriminate like different species and how much of the different species are in the water column. There's another sample that is for malt water. What we do with that sample is analyze how much
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
of the ocean water comes from the melting glaciers. And then another sample is for genetic analysis. There's also like other people that is going to analyze that sample and like try to look at like the diversity of the phytoplankton, but like in a genetic way.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Yeah. So from the samples that we collected, we have recorded like several different blooms. So a bloom is like when a phytoplankton species or a group species, they're like super happy. They like the temperature, the nutrients, whatever they have. And they can just divide themselves and grow exponentially. But like... In a couple hours or days.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
And so you get like millions of cells per liter of water.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
And so... you can have these huge blooms and you can sometimes see them like from space or like even in the water, you see like, you know, there's what they call like red ties when you see like red coloration in the water. That's phytoplankton blooms.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
But sometimes they are like not evident at all unless you count the cells or you look at them under the microscope that you actually identify these blooms. Um, so yeah, we have been looking at the samples and finding a lot of different blooms, uh, in the different years, some years with like more blooms or like diverse blooms and some with less phytoplankton.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Yeah, it's really hard to say if the phytoplankton is actually going to decline or not. I mean, there are some theories that say they're more likely to switch, like the species are going to be different. But of course, every single thing that happens is going to have an impact on the rest of the ecosystem. In Antarctic especially, so everything kind of relies on krill.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Krill is this little crustacean. It kind of looks like shrimp and it's what We sometimes hear about, like, oh, what whales eat, but mostly everything in Antarctica at some point relies on krill, and krill relies on a specific group of phytoplankton, which are the larger diatoms. So what happens if the diatoms are not there anymore?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
They will have to look for other food, and that would have, like, a major impact on... the rest of the ecosystem.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Well, I feel like the time is now to understand these places before like they change or they're gone. A lot of things that could be super cool happening and we have no idea. Like, you know, sometimes you see in the news like, oh, they discovered like this very weird protein that has this anticoagulant aspect or something. And they found it in like a fish that was hiding in the world. Yeah.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So probably there's a lot of things happening too that we have no idea. Especially thinking more like Antarctica and like how the organisms are adapted to live that way. So yeah, maybe it's the key for something good hiding there.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
There are some estimations that say like 50% of the oxygen that is on the atmosphere comes from the ocean and specifically from the phytoplankton.