Chapter 1: What role do plankton play in the ocean's ecosystem?
Now, they are everywhere in the sea, making up a staggering 90% of the biomass in the ocean.
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.
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Chapter 2: How do plankton contribute to the carbon cycle and climate regulation?
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. And to be noted that plankton... Yeah. The word plankton is the same as the word planet. I mean, the roots of the word plankton comes from the same roots as the word of planet. And plankton are drifting in the ocean, just like the planet, our planet, is drifting in the universe.
You know, so that's a bit like this very small comes with a very large and a very big, but they are all the same. I did not know that. I thought plankton were just always microorganisms. And when I think of plankton, I think of these wildly exotic and varied different types of microorganisms that don't really look like anything else.
Chapter 3: What makes plankton unique compared to other microorganisms?
Those sort of zooplankton that I'm thinking of, they are very important to how our entire planet functions. Yeah, I mean, all plankton are very important to the way the planet is working, actually, which is why we are doing all of this and trying to raise awareness about the role of plankton, which is, I mean, which we start to know about it.
I mean, we start to understand because, once again, it's invisible mostly. Even through the jellyfish are not invisible, of course, but most of the plankton is invisible. So we don't know anything about it because it's in the ocean and invisible. That's two reasons for us to ignore it, looks like. But it's so important.
And some of the creatures are very, they have different forms and they are beautiful, actually. Yeah. Some of them are amazing. The most famous one being the copepod that you may refer to, which is like a very, very small crustacean. And they are essential to create food for the entire food chain in the ocean and beyond. They are also essential to oxygen the ocean.
to move the oxygen in the ocean because they are the biggest migration on Earth. They sink in the deep ocean at night and they come to the surface during the day to hunt.
Chapter 4: Why are plankton crucial for the food chain in the ocean?
So they contribute to a good mix, a healthy mix in the ocean. But any plantain is vital. And more importantly, they are vital to to the biggest part of the planet because they are vital to climate, they are vital to the cycle of water, they are vital to oxygen creation, to nutrient and phosphate circulation and so forth. So all the geochemical process rely on plankton actually.
You have said that plankton defines the temperature of the planet. How can that be? Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, we know that the ocean absorbs 30% of our emissions, and most of it is due to plankton. Because depending on the type of plankton you have in the ocean, they will sink in the ocean or they will stay at the surface.
I mean, typically, to make it very, very simple, the ecosystems over for the last 300 million years are characterized by some type of plankton that have a shell. which has, by the way, created the rocks we know. And the Dover's Cliff, for instance, they are all shells of dead plankton, actually, just like the chokes we use at school and so forth. But we're not going to do that, not now.
But so when the dead plankton are the shells, they are sinking in the deep ocean.
Chapter 5: How does human activity affect plankton populations?
So they are sequestering carbon doing that. massively because there are a lot of them. They represent, as you say, 90% of the biomass in the ocean. So they sink a lot of carbon when they sink.
But if they are replaced by plankton that stays at the surface, as it is the case right now because of our human activities, so they tend to be replaced for the last years by plankton that stays on the surface. then the carbon will be released in the atmosphere and will not be sunk in the deep ocean.
And that's a big, big difference because then we are talking about 30% of the global emissions that are currently absorbed by the ocean that may not be anymore. And maybe the ocean will start to emit carbon as such. And then that will be the end of the game for all of the existing ecosystem because None of us can survive this.
I mean, you can become vegan and take your bike and do whatever you want. I mean, no one will reverse the magnitude of that change. So that's why it's so important to keep the plankton communities as they are. Because if they change, the rest of the ecosystem will change and we will disappear. So what has changed that has allowed the plankton to stay on the surface?
Chapter 6: What is the significance of phytoplankton in oxygen production?
Why is the plankton staying on the surface and not sinking now? because this type of plankton, they have no shells. They do not create any shells. Why have they suddenly flourished? Well, the different type of plankton domination, you know, because of all the anthropic activities, like releasing nutrients, releasing phosphate, warming up the climate.
Right, and so the dominant species at the surface, they've thrived in this new environment as opposed to... Yeah, exactly, it's just different. Right, okay. Because I was going to ask you, you know, when we look at plankton... You know, it's so diverse, they can't be very well genetically related, right? I mean, it's got to be a lot of diverse plankton out there. Why do we see that?
Why don't we see a sort of a monoculture of plankton, given the free reign of the ocean and the resources that you need to take advantage of to survive? Why don't we see a monoculture of plankton? Because we don't know anything about plankton. But really, we don't know anything.
Chapter 7: How do plastics impact plankton and marine life?
Just to give you an example, 10 years ago, we launched an expedition to characterize virus in the ocean, to understand the virus. And we knew about 40 or zero different virus in the ocean at this time. 10 years after, we know half a million. So that's the same with any genes and any type of plankton that is in the ocean.
We have discovered 150 million new genes in the ocean over the last 10 years. I mean, in our body, we have 20,000 genes. So you can imagine what 150 million new genes are. And we have discovered only 10% of what's in the ocean. So we cannot cultivate plankton. We don't know how to do that because we don't know them. We don't know what kills them. We don't know what makes them thrive.
We don't know what supports this community or these others. And that has consequences on all the food chains. I mean, today there's the whales, and we are so concerned about the whales, and no one cares about what feeds them, but we are so concerned about the whales, but the whales are starving more than anything.
Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from the man who survived on plankton?
I mean, overfishing is not the biggest of their concern. Their biggest concern is starving. I mean, they don't have food anymore. So we need to understand that, and we need to learn how to cultivate plankton in the future, indeed, so we can create a balance in our ecosystem.
If we understand plankton, then we will understand the entire biology of our planet, and we'll be able to repair and heal the planet, which makes sense, because if you think about it, I mean... Over the last 4 billion years of life on Earth, life has started 4 billion years ago. 3.5 billion years are purely plankton in the ocean.
And then life goes in the continent and so forth over the last 500 million years only. It's like an epiphenomenon. So the basis of everything and 90% of the history of life on Earth is in the ocean and it's plankton. So if you want to repair something, I mean, you don't start with the roof, you start with the foundation. And the foundation of life is plankton. So let's look at it.
If we want to create the right balance and the right equilibrium for our planet and repair our planet and reconnect the cycle together so it works again. What's the main function of phytoplankton? 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. 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.
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