Vincent Doumeizel

And doing that, when they started doing that 2 billion years ago, they destroyed everything.

Because oxygen was a toxic gas for life at this age.

So they destroyed 99% of life on the planet, releasing oxygen.

After that, life evolved and learned how to use oxygen.

And all our ancestors did the same.

So we all come from there.

But no, this phytoplankton is quite unique because they will create, they are the lowest trophic level you can find in the ocean.

They will create most of the, I mean, all the biomass.

And they create it very, very quickly.

Like every day, the phytoplankton creation is equivalent to like, if you take a plank of wood, you know, like a piece of wood.

Yeah.

a normal one, like 30 centimeters, it would go every day from the Earth to the moon, I mean, the plankton creation.

So it's like a huge creation, a huge biomass creation, more than anything, and a lot of oxygen as well.

It's crazy because the plants are the other big source of oxygen.

So basically, plankton is 50% of the oxygen creation, roughly, and the plants on land, they are 50%.

But plankton is 0.2% of the biomass, while the plants are 80% of the biomass.

So you can imagine how efficient they are at creating oxygen and the rest of the biomass.

But I imagine the introduction of the plastics and microplastics over the past number of decades has been hugely problematic.

But do we have any evidence that microorganisms and plankton are badly suffering because of plastic?

Well, that really depends.