Anyone who has ever watched an ocean documentary, or at least a 30 second clip on YouTube, knows that the sea is full of vast, exotic landscapes. We dive down with lights and cameras and submarines and witness huge reefs, shelves and canyons. We also see hosts of all kinds of life, much of it new to us. This perspective of the ocean fills us with awe.
It may surprise you to realize that plankton do not share our sense of wonder.
Being tiny creatures who live in the sea, plankton have an entirely different perspective of what they want out of 70 percent of the planet. When you’re the size of a grain of sand, one cubic foot of ocean pretty much looks like any other. Plankton could probably live in a water tank, with the right conditions, and still feel normal. Yet, it’s the right conditions that are complicated, because they aren’t the things we might normally think of.
Here’s an example of what I mean: the newest edition of the Journal of Marine Systems (an Elsevier joint) is a special issue entitled “The Impact of Small-Scale Physics on Marine Biology”. All the papers are from a conference held in northern Germany waaaaay back in 2005. (I’m not sure what took so long, but I think it had to do with translation of some of them into English. It can be hard when you use words like “autochthonous” )
The point of the papers, as stated by the editor, is to illustrate the latest research into the role that small-scale turbulence can have on large-scale biology. The reason it can have that influence is because the entire base of the food chain operates in a small-scale world. The small aquatic forces (I mean much smaller then tides and currents) that carry plankton around has a profound effect on the livelihood of plankton and other tiny creatures. It can carry them from light to dark, from shallow to deep, inside and outside the range of both predator and prey, and really dictates the course of their lives. If you trust Eric Benet enough to believe that “all we are is dust in the wind”, we ain’t got nothing on the little guys.
If you get to read the papers in J. Mar. Sys. and dive around, and if you make it through a truly disgusting amount of calculus, you’ll realize how complicated it is to understand a world that is constantly churning, and how we are beginning to develop the tools necessary to comprehend. Imagine dropping a single dinoflagellate into a glass of water, and then sticking a straw inside and blowing bubbles. That’s normal to them. Imagine trying to study how a species moves, reacts, eats, mates and dances in that environment.
The amazing part is that the creatures not only cool with turbulence, but they depend on it. In fact, turbulence can help push plankton that have gone too deep back up into the warmer water, where their tiny little flippers can propel them to a happy place without suffering a long vertical haul. In that case, turbulence is their savior.
So, if you’re ever feeling down, like life is just too much for you to handle, just remember the life of plankton. Realize that maybe the turbulence of life may be just the kind of environment that you want, even need. Alternatively, don’t try to extrapolate any lesson at all and just relish that fact that you’re humongous.
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