Name: 植物プランクトン。地球上で最も重要な生命体 (Phytoplankton: Arguably the Most Important Life on Earth)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:30:09.000Z
Duration: 7 min 3 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for partnering with us

They hope you have a plank-ton of fun watching!

Right now, there are incredible creatures in the ocean

with the power to reshape the planet's atmosphere.

And you've probably never even seen them,

unless you've looked at seawater under a microscope.

I'm talking, of course, about phytoplankton,

the microscopic critters that almost all life in the oceans

Phytoplankton is a catch-all category for all the tiny aquatic

organisms that can turn sunlight into food via photosynthesis.

And there are all kinds of different organisms included in it,

from cyanobacteria to whip-tailed dinoflagellates

Diatoms are essentially algae that build little houses of glass

And they come in a stunning diversity of forms.

In fact, if you've ever spread diatomaceous earth

There are also coccolithophores, which can look

kind of like a soccer ball covered in frisbees thanks to

their teeny-tiny shells made of calcium carbonate.

In fact, England's famous White Cliffs of Dover contain

the fossilized remains of countless coccolithophores.

And in today's ocean, the smelly compounds they produce

help give the sea its unmistakable scent—a smell birds

like albatrosses use to find their meals.

The compounds that make those smells also can travel

up high into the atmosphere to help clouds form and grow,

making them more reflective and helping to keep us

They have two tail-like flagella that help them swim around,

which makes for some really magical effects.

But, too many of them in one place can create a harmful algal bloom

—a phenomenon you might have heard referred to as “red tide”.

Which is just one example of how these super teeny creatures

can have a big impact on the rest of us—even us landlubbers.

they are unbelievably important to all life on Earth.

First off, they're the foundation of the marine food web,

underpinning everything from anchovies to whales.

In fact, with a wee bit of help from seaweed and aquatic plants,

they manage to support life in the ocean despite being outweighed

by roughly five to one by organisms that don't make their own food.

And if that's not enough, they're also atmosphere-altering machines.

They consume about as much carbon dioxide as all of

the world's forests and other plants combined, pulling roughly

eleven gigatons of carbon from our atmosphere every year.

Which is especially impressive when you consider that

by mass, there's about 450 times as much plant life on land.

Plus, phytoplankton account for more than half

of the planet's yearly oxygen production.

But even more importantly, they're kind of the reason

Back about 2.5 billion years ago, near the boundary

between the Archean and Proterozoic eons,

And the atmosphere was likely a mix of gases like

ammonia and methane that would immediately kill us.

Then, cyanobacteria evolved and ran rampant,

pumping out a huge amount of oxygen in what's now called

All that oxygen helped turn the ocean and skies blue,

and likely jump-started the evolution of complex life.

Then, around 540 million years ago, phytoplankton did it again,

exploding in numbers and bringing us up to more or less

the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere today.

Paleontologists think the boom may have occurred

thanks to nutrients weathered out of rocks by giant,

Or, a more recent idea is that it happened

because the plankton evolved a more efficient internal machinery

Either way, this set the stage for life to fully spread

For example, paleontologists think the evolution

of calcifying plankton balanced ocean chemistry

and helped protect the seas from mass extinctions.

the ocean was not a super stable place to be.

Changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere from events

like volcanic eruptions often caused deadly swings in seawater pH.

Then, some lineages of plankton—including those

ball-like coccolithophores—figured out how to make shells

And over a relatively short period of time, so many

of their shells sank to the depths of the oceans that

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植物プランクトン。地球上で最も重要な生命体 (Phytoplankton: Arguably the Most Important Life on Earth)

deserve

evolve

consume

atmosphere