Elegy for phytoplankton

It’s too bad the microscopic organisms that make up phytoplankton don’t have faces. These creatures live in both fresh and salt water and are the basis of aquatic food webs. There are numerous types, and there are bejillions of them. The trouble is that there used to be even bejillions more of them.

According to a recent study, the ocean phytoplankton population has been reduced 40 percent since 1950. The warming ocean is blamed.

Phytoplankton use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis, just like land-based plants, producing oxygen. In addition, then, to letting us know that the oceans and atmosphere are profoundly diseased, the loss of phytoplankton bodes ill for the continuing rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Which warms the ocean and kills more phytoplankton, which… well, once I start thinking about these feedback spirals, I want to pull my hair out.

Of course, along with the corporate-funded mouthpieces of denial and the happy-go-lucky idiots who can’t wait for all that poison ivy (“but carbon dioxide makes plants grow!”), I don’t want this information to be true, either. Maybe the study’s useless, maybe they put the decimal in the wrong place. Maybe.

But we are living in the Anthropocene Extinction, the era of human-caused extinction of life form after life form; you have to have a lot of “belief” – read delusion – to pretend there’s anything good here as we make a desert of the future.

Like so many things of the natural world, phytoplankton isn’t on very many iSonars. It doesn’t have a face; it’s not cute and cuddly; and sure as hell nobody is demonstrating to save it.

More’s the pity. These little life forms are astonishingly beautiful. Google some images, or take a look here and here. Tiny, but a world in of themselves: the perfect illustration of Darwin’s poetic “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”