Vincent Doumeizel

They drive the carbon cycle.

They even form clouds.

They feed the biggest animal that's ever existed on Earth.

And yet we know comparatively little about them.

I'm talking, of course, about plankton.

Very, very little about them.

Vincent Dumazil is a senior advisor on the oceans to the United Nations Global Compact and author of The Power of Plankton, How Plankton Made Life on Earth Possible and Why It's Key to Our Future.

He joins me now.

Vincent, welcome to the program.

In researching this piece, I find out so many fascinating things.

And the first off, is it right to say that plankton is not really a biological type of microorganism?

It's defined completely differently.

Yeah, plankton gathers a wide range of creatures and organisms, which are all characterized by the fact that they live in suspension and cannot swim against the current.

They are drifters or wanderers, and the word plankton comes from the word planktos in Greek, which means drifting.

That's what they are.

So they gather a very wide range of organism, once again, which goes from tiny, tiny virus, which can be 50,000 times thinner than a hair, up to the Siphonophorus, which is the longest animal on the planet, which is a kind of a jellyfish.

which could be up to 100 meters long.

What?

Yeah, so that's comparing plankton.

The smallest plankton to the largest plankton is like to compare a hand to the size of Great Britain, actually.