Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World

"It’s a 21st century version of a Robert Hooke book – in vivid color and beautiful photomicrographs. If you were to take Hooke and bring him into the modern world and say, ‘OK Bobby, here you go, here’s a microscope, and by the way, you have this new thing called a “camera” and you can take pictures of the beasts!’ he would have had been in scientific Heaven—just like Christian when he made these images. Hooke would have been absolutely fascinated by the plankton, and would have loved to have made these very, very beautiful images that almost literally bring to life what the microscopic world is. Christian Sardet is a developmental biologist by training. He’s French and lives in Villefranche-sur-Mer, right next to Nice in the south of France. He became fascinated with microscopic photography during his professional work. Several years ago, Christian became interested in plankton, because of the so-called ‘Tara’ expedition. Tara is a French midsized sail boat that went around the world sampling organisms from all over, actually following some of the same lines as Darwin’s journey in the Beagle. Christian started to image organisms during that period. It’s an incredibly beautiful book, almost a coffee table book , but it’s also a serious science book . You could take it as both. The beautiful photographs and colours are of organisms from the plankton that are photosynthetic — the phytoplankton — to zooplankton, to larvae of various animals in their planktonic phase. For those who don’t know, the word plankton is from the Greek. It’s the same root as the word ‘planet.’ It means to drift. By definition, plankton are organisms that cannot control their horizontal motion in the water. They just drift with the currents. Some of them can go up and down in the water column, but they can’t go in the x-y direction. Their body forms have fascinated scientists and people who have seen images of them for over a century. Christian has helped bring these organisms to life in a book. That’s right. That’s a calculation I did with a few colleagues almost 20 years ago now. It was a fascinating exercise, figuring out what the productivity of the planet was. When we realized that about 45% of the oxygen on Earth is produced by less than 1% of the biomass, that was something of a shocker."