10 Things You Didn't Know Came from the Ocean

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Comments

[Dan Underhill]

For at least a decade early in my plumbing career, I (like many other plumbers) would use any one of a number of products containing copper-sulfate to eradicate roots growing in sewer lines. That was before I read a study showing that no sewage treatment plant can remove copper-sulfate from wastewater, so it all eventually gets into the ocean, where it kills both kinds of plankton for five years of the five-year study. Whether it would continue to kill plankton for 10 years if it had been a 10-year study is up for grabs. Since then I have made sure my plumbing suppliers stopped carrying any such product. I believe such products are banned by now.

[Mary Jana]

No one, and I mean NO ONE, does barbecue plankton like meh big sis Kat. Whenever the Jana family has our big holiday get-togethers, there will be Kat, donning some sort of funny little bbq chef's outfit, ready to turn protein into magic. And when plankton is on the menu, leave it to Kat to put on that apron with the cartoon rendering of an orca with the caption, "Where's mine?" LOL! Gets me every time.

Kat says the secret is in the way she butterflies the plankton before applying her secret garlic baste. Also, she always goes the extra mile and chooses the free range over the cage raised. Really makes all the difference. Ummmmm, I can practically taste it now!

[Carl May]

One big thing we don't know about oceanic plankton, especially phytoplankton, is how well it is doing. With few actual measurements, it has long been assumed the phytos were chugging along marvelously in spite of all the other problems in the ocean--decline in all the world's major fisheries, ocean acidification with increasing levels of CO2, etc. The base of the food web was blithely assumed to be okay even as other parts of the living complex were being hammered.

Recent measurements and data-mining by scientists at Dalhousie University in Canada call the smiley-faced assumptions into question. By one estimate in their studies, phytoplankton have declined by 50 percent over the past 100 years, with 80 percent of that 50 percent decline in the past 50 years. Critics of the research protocols (Pollyannas and scientists whose pet oxen are being gored) question the results. So, more measurements are being made now as the debate heats up.

Ubiquitous, maybe, but quite possibly 50 percent of what was ubiquitous before, with huge implications for primary productivity in the oceans and all that depends on that photosynthesis.

[Steve Sinai]

What's so amazing about plankton? It's ubiquitous.

[Kathy Jana]

Most amazing of all, plankton - at the bottom of the ocean foodweb
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/marinefoodwebs.htm