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| Phytoplankton and copepods are the first two steps in the plankton food chain |
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| The author and plankton scientist Dr Richard Kirby |
Of course, as well as eating fish, we also consume many marine creatures that had a larval life in the plankton such as shrimps, crabs, and mussels etc. In some countries we also eat plankton too, such as Antarctic krill that is eaten in Japan as Okami. In fact, in Britain during the Second World War there were trials in Scottish sea lochs to determine whether large static nets could harvest sufficient plankton to supplement the national diet should food become scarce. While those early Scottish trials in the 1940s proved unsuccessful, today, a commercial copepod harvest for food for aquaculture occurs in some Norwegian Fjords by using large nets towed by trawlers. Now, we need to pay attention to the plankton more than ever. Living at the sea surface the plankton are particularly sensitive to changes in sea surface temperature, which is influenced by the air temperature above. (We often forget that we can engineer our thermal environment unlike other life on Earth that lives where the temperature suits it best.)
My research and that of other plankton scientists, is revealing that rising sea temperatures due to current climate change are altering the abundance, distribution, and seasonality of the plankton throughout the oceans with ensuing ramifications for the marine food chain, our commercial fisheries, and the wider marine ecosystem. Unfortunately, in this short blog there wasn’t time to tell you how the plankton do so much more than just support the marine food web. However, you can find out how much more by watching my short film Ocean Drifters, a secret world beneath the waves, narrated by David Attenborough: https://vimeo.com/84872751
Dr Richard Kirby is a British plankton expert, scientist, author and speaker. Follow Richard @planktonpundit on Twitter. You can see more images of plankton and learn more about them in Dr Richard Kirby’s book “Ocean Drifters, a secret world beneath the waves” available on Amazon and as an iBook.
