Kyle Mayers: What does the ocean mean to me?

As a biologist, to me the ocean means life. Not just the larger organisms we are all familiar with – whales, turtles, sharks – but the microscopic life, the ones which can only be seen with a microscope and drift around in the oceans, the plankton. This is beautifully illustrated with the image below from a single drop of seawater.

One concentrated drop of seawater, showing the diversity of life which can be found in the oceans (credit: David Littschwager, littschwager.com)

Although sometimes it is possible to see some of these plankton without the aid of a microscope, take for instance this sample collected from the Arctic.

Copepods collected through the use of a plankton net from Isfjorden in Svalbard, a close up image of one of these copepods is included as an inset

Although dominated by small animals of the sea (zooplankton) the copepods were there in such high abundance, collected from the top 10 metres of the water column!

This life can come in such wonderful and diverse forms. The image below shows the diversity of one group of microbial marine plants – phytoplankton – the diatoms. Which produce armoured shells of silica and can be found in a dazzling array of shapes.

Diatoms – phytoplankton with an armoured shell made of silica produce some wonderful and beautiful forms (credit microscopy-uk.org.uk)

The appearance of these organisms is enough to astound anyone, but sometimes it is what they do which captivates me. Certain species of dinoflagellates – another group of the phytoplankton – are able to produce light when they are disturbed, a process known as bioluminescence, and can display some of the most amazing images in nature.

Bioluminescent phytoplankton (dinoflagellates). Produce some of the most beautiful scenes in nature, here seen at Mosquito Bay, Vieques, Puerto Rico (credit Doug Perrine, Alamy).

It is both the beauty and the mystery of the plankton which makes studying them every day an amazing and rewarding experience.