Vincent Doumeizel

What do they do differently than other plankton?

Well, first of all, we decided that's an interesting thing as well.

We decided that in plankton, you will find fungi, you will find bacteria, you will find archaea, you will find virus, and some things that we call phyto- and zooplankton, which is denied by science today because we tried to map what's existing on land into the ocean.

But once again,

Life on land, 500 million years.

Life in the ocean, 4 billion years.

So you can imagine that the level of complexity is way, way bigger there than on land.

So the frontier between vegetal and animal is not there.

I mean, it's not even existing.

I mean, they are all both, basically.

Most of them are both vegetal and animal in the planktonic world.

So we can call them vege-moles.

Yeah.

Transgender plankton.

But it's more than these.

They can either feed on other plankton or take the light and create biomass out of sunlight.

But anyway, what we call phytoplankton, which is the lowest trophic level, which is the first level of biomass creation,

So they are very unique because they do photosynthesis.

So they take the sunlight and the carbon dioxide and they create their living matter and they release oxygen in the atmosphere.

And that's quite unique.