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Photographer Johnny Chien captured the glorious blue glow in the water caused by bioluminescent plankton at a Santa Cruz County beach in mid-July. "The bioluminescent plankton is back at Seacliff. I took this picture this morning at 2:54 a.m.. I don't think this shot of the ship from this angle would be possible if the pier was still there, as it would probably be in the way," wrote Chien on Instagram. Advertisement The blue glow is caused by a common species of plankton called Lingulodinium polyhedra. Members of Lingulodinium polyhedra, a species of single-celled dinoflagellates, appear to be reddish-brown during...

This is the incredible moment a whale shark gulped down a never-before-photographed 'tornado' of plankton. Warren Baverstock, 49, hung a single light off the back of a boat to attract the phytoplankton that the huge fish love to eat - and then waited patiently out in the dark ocean. He was delighted when a 11.4ft juvenile whale shark rose from the depths to gobble up the plumes of gathering food, and he hopped in to capture silhouetted by the light.

Living bacteria were found on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS), and they might have extraterrestrial origins, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov said. The microorganisms will be studied further on Earth. Shkaplerov, an ISS expedition flight engineer who will take his third trip to the ISS in December as part of the Expedition 54 crew, said that scientists found living bacteria while they were taking samples from the surface of the station. Speaking to TASS, he said that the microorganisms might have come from outer space. ... However, traces of bacteria originating on Earth – from Madagascar – and...

Hyperia | Credit WikimediaDespite the fuss about CO2 emissions, on a global scale no one is quite sure where a lot of it ends up. Those mystery “sinks” draw in a large proportion of CO2. Here’s a big sink that just got twice as big.Science Daily  Mar. 17, 2013 — Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers studying the origin of Earth's first breathable atmosphere have zeroed in on the major role played by some very unassuming creatures: plankton. In a paper to appear in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ohio State University researcher Matthew Saltzman and his colleagues show how plankton provided a critical link between the atmosphere and chemical isotopes stored in rocks 500 million years ago. This work builds on the team's earlier discovery that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that...

WASHINGTON – Changing wind patterns linked to global warming are altering the food chain in Antarctica and may lead to further increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most basic food, plankton, is declining in the northern portions of the Antarctic peninsula reaching toward South America, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science. At the same time, populations of Adelie penguins, who require a colder climate, have dropped sharply in that region, while warmer-weather chin-strap penguins have increased. "We're showing for the first time that there is an ongoing change on phytoplankton concentration and composition along the...

Vanishing Arctic sea ice brought on by climate change is causing the crucially important microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton to bloom explosively and die away as never before, a phenomenon that is likely to create havoc among migratory creatures that rely on the ocean for food, Stanford scientists have found. A few organisms may benefit from this disruption of the Arctic’s fragile ecology, but a variety of animals, from gray whales to seabirds, will suffer, said Stanford biological oceanographer Kevin Arrigo. "It’s all a question of timing," Arrigo said. "If migratory animals reach the Arctic and find the phytoplankton’s gone,...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Marine microorganisms have been found in amber dating from the middle of the Cretaceous period. The fossils were collected in Charente, in France. This completely unexpected discovery will deepen our understanding of these lost marine species as well as providing precious data about the coastal environment of Western France during the Cretaceous.This work was carried out by researchers at the Géosciences Rennes laboratory (CNRS/Université de Rennes 1), together with researchers from the Paléobiodiversité et Paléoenvironnement laboratory in Paris (CNRS/Muséum national d'histoire naturelle/Université Pierre et Marie Curie) and the Centre de Géochimie de la Surface in Strasbourg (CNRS/Université de...

Ocean Plankton Reducing Greenhouse Gases By Using More Carbon DioxideMicroalgae under the microscope: CO2-feeders in the ocean. (Credit: A. Stuhr/ IFM-GEOMAR) ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2007) — Microscopically tiny marine organisms known as plankton increase their carbon uptake in response to increased concentrations of dissolved CO2 and thereby contribute to a dampening of the greenhouse effect on a global scale. An international group of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany documented this biological mechanism in a natural plankton community for the first time. In simulations of the future ocean, they measured an increased CO2 uptake...

SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 — Can plankton help save the planet? Some Silicon Valley technocrats are betting that it just might. In an effort to ameliorate the effects of global warming, several groups are working on ventures to grow vast floating fields of plankton intended to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carry it to the depths of the ocean. It is an idea, debated by experts for years, that still sounds like science fiction — and some scholars think that is where it belongs. But even though many questions remain unanswered, the first commercial project is scheduled to...

Atmospheric scientists have reported a new and potentially important mechanism by which chemical emissions from ocean phytoplankton may influence the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight away from our planet. This intimate connection between life and the environment of Earth could have profound implications for the future of our planet's global ecosystem. Discovery of the new link between clouds and the biosphere grew out of efforts to explain increased cloud cover observed over an area of the Southern Ocean where a large bloom of phytoplankton was occurring. Based on satellite data, the researchers hypothesized that airborne particles produced by oxidation...

Concentrations of the natural pigment chlorophyll in coastal waters have been shown to rise prior to earthquakes. These chlorophyll increases are due to blooms of plankton, which use the pigment to convert solar energy to chemical energy via photosynthesis. A joint US-Indian team of researchers analysed satellite data on ocean coastal areas lying near the epicentres of four recent quakes. Details of the research appear in the journal Advances in Space Research. They say that monitoring peaks in chlorophyll could provide early information on an impending earthquake. The authors say the chlorophyll blooms are linked to a release of thermal...

Marine Organisms Threatened By Increasingly Acidic Ocean Corals and Plankton May Have Difficulty Making Shells Every day, the average person on the planet burns enough fossil fuel to emit 24 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, out of which about nine pounds is then taken up by the ocean. As this CO2 combines with seawater, it forms an acid in a process known as ocean acidification. A new study by an international team of oceanographers published in the September 29, 2005 issue of Nature reports that ocean acidification could result in corrosive chemical conditions much sooner than previously thought....