The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
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If you had to pick a favorite ocean critter, what would it be? Whale? Dolphin? Penguin? Coral? One of my new favorites after talking with biologist Martina Messioni is phytoplankton.

They're the base of the food web in most of the ocean areas. And like our Earth is like 70% ocean. So everything that happens in the ocean relies on phytoplankton eventually. Plankton comes from the Greek word for drifter and refers to anything that can't swim against the current, which makes jellyfish planktons.

And the plankton we're talking about today, phytoplankton, can make their own food from sunlight through photosynthesis. Because of this, the whole ocean needs them. And so do humans. There are some estimations that say like 50% of the oxygen that is on the atmosphere is come from the ocean and specifically from the phytoplankton.

Martina studies phytoplankton that live in Antarctic polar fjords, these narrow ocean inlets that have been carved out by glaciers. Because of the crystal clear water and the abundance of nutrients like nitrates, phosphates, and sulfur, there are a lot of phytoplankton in and near the surface of these waters. So many that in the summer, there are enough of them to feed the millions of tons of krill that then feed all the whales that migrate to Antarctica.

So it's a very, very productive community, and it's also very diverse. There are a lot of kinds of phytoplankton that have adapted to live in these polar fjords in a certain balance with each other. But new research Martina is doing as part of a community science program called Fjord Phyto suggests that balance may be shifting. Samples collected by Antarctic tour operators and tourists are beginning to pick apart the influence of climate change on the foundation of the ocean's food web.

So today on the show, how regular people are fueling research on some of the tiniest, most influential critters on Earth, and how the shifting balance of power could ripple across the entire ocean. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Okay. So Martina, what do we know about phytoplankton or maybe a better question is what don't we know about them? So like there's so many things that we didn't know about phytoplankton, specifically from Antarctica. Like

how phytoplankton will behave with changes in the environment. Then the diversity, like how diverse is phytoplankton? Like how many species are there? And I feel like year after year, there are more and more species coming through. And like the more that we get also into the genes,

of those specific species, the more that we learn that, oh, actually, we have no idea what is going on there. Okay, so we're talking about these fjords. We're talking about these phytoplankton. Where do they live in the water column?

So phytoplankton, they depend on the sunlight to photosynthesize. You can find phytoplankton 60 meters below the water level, but the highest concentration of phytoplankton is always going to be like in the first few meters. Okay, so they're in these fjords, they're surrounded by these glaciers that are melting into the ocean. What do we know about that process?

Yeah, I mean, we know how the glaciers are retreating. So like some studies that say like 80%, 87% of the glaciers that are in the Antarctic Peninsula are retreating. That means they're melting faster or they're not like growing or stable. But how much actual melt water it is in the ocean and how that melt water is affecting the communities is what we're trying to understand.

So a huge way that you've learned about phytoplankton in these waters is the Fjord Phyto Project. It's a massive community science project where like regular people on like tour ships are collecting samples that you and other scientists can then like analyze in the lab. So how do passengers physically collect these samples? So we...

Collaborate with different tour vessel that go down to Antarctica from like November till March. So like Southern summer months. So what we do is train those two guys that are going to be with different passengers to run the program where they're on board. Oh, wow. And so...

What happens is like when they're down in the peninsula, they have like a list of sites that they can go sample. So when they're like, oh, tomorrow we're going to one of these sites and we want to do fear fighter. And so they have like a GPS location they can go. So they go down in like an inflatable boat with the kit attached.

For the sampling, like the instruments and the bottles and everything, a group of guests that are interested in helping gather the samples. And so they kind of like have a list of samples and data that they have to gather when they are there. So you rely on these passenger vessels to collect water samples from like dozens of locations. And sometimes you get to go. Like, what is that like? Yeah, I feel like it's very...

meaningful because like the passengers sometimes they didn't expect at all like to go to antarctica do some science and so when they're doing that they're like super excited like they didn't even even think about that when they were like you know booking a vacation and then most of that people have never heard like even the word fireblinked in before so when you talk about like how

Whales depend on them, unlike penguins, which is actually what they wanted to see in Antarctica, whales and penguins. So when you talk about like, whoa, the whales and penguins wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the phytoplankton. I feel like that kind of blows their mind a little bit. And I think it adds a lot of value to their trip. Okay, so why passenger ships? Like, how does that help with the phytoplankton research? So...

First of all, we kind of like start like describing what happened in these places that the ships actually go. We have no idea what happened there. Like there was sometimes no description for the fight plankton before that.

And we're also understanding better what happens through the whole season. So from November to March, it is a lot of information. When you go with a research vessel, sometimes you go like a month or like two weeks or like very short periods of time. So you have sometimes one month of information from one year and then the next year they couldn't go on the same months. So you have another month.

And so then you have to put it all together like a big puzzle. And from the like Fjord Fido project, you have like more continuous data like from these passenger ships. What have you learned like in putting together this puzzle so far? So from this, we learned how these places were behaving like the whole summer.

And then year after year, how that was changing. So you're just trying to like figure out like what the ecosystem even looks like. Yeah. Okay. Cool. At least for the fighter bunk to level. Yeah. Okay. So you've, you've got samples from all these passenger ships. Um, what can you learn from those samples? We got a different kind of samples. So one sample is for microscopy counting and that's the sample that I, or the people at the university where I work analyze.

So what we do with that sample is like discriminate like different species and how much of the different species are in the water column. There's another sample that is for meltwater. What we do with that sample is analyze how much of the ocean water comes from the melting glaciers. And then another sample is for genetic analysis.

There's also, like, other people that is going to analyze that sample and, like, try to look at, like, the diversity of the phytoplankton, but, like, in a genetic way. So there's all different kinds of phytoplankton. And I know that they can bloom, like, this explosion in population, like, maybe a couple times a year. And even some of them are so big, you can see them from space. So can you see, like, a huge jump in the population in the samples that people, like, return to?

to you during these blooms? Yeah. So from the samples that we collected, we have recorded like several different blooms. So a bloom is like when a phytoplankton species or a group species, they're like super happy. They like the temperature, the nutrients, whatever they have, and they can just divide themselves and grow exponentially. But like

In a couple hours or days. And so you get like millions of cells per liter of water. Wow. And so you can have these huge blooms and you can sometimes see them like from space or like even in the water, you see like

you know, there's what they call like red ties when you see like red coloration in the water. That's phytoplankton blooms. But sometimes they are like not evident at all unless you count the cells or you look at them under the microscope that you actually identify these blooms. So yeah, we have been looking at the samples and finding a lot of different blooms in the different years. Some years with like

more blooms or like diverse blooms and some with less phytoplankton. Can you talk about what would happen if something happens to these phytoplankton and their numbers start to decline? Like how would that affect other things? Yeah, it's really hard to say if the phytoplankton is actually going to decline or not. Or if it's

It is more, I mean, there are some theories that say they're more likely to switch, like the species are going to be different. But of course, every single thing that happens is going to have an impact on the rest of the ecosystem. In Antarctica especially, so everything kind of relies on krill. Krill is this little crustacean. It kind of looks like shrimp and it's what we sometimes hear about, like, oh, what whales eat.

But mostly everything in Antarctica at some point relies on krill. And krill relies on a specific group of phytoplankton, which are the larger diatoms. So what happens if the diatoms are not there anymore? They will have to look for other food. And that would have like a major impact on life.

the rest of the ecosystem. Why do you think like really understanding this ecosystem, really understanding the populations of phytoplankton in Antarctica, why is that so important? Well, I feel like the time is now to understand these places before like they change or they're gone. A lot of things that could be super cool happening and we have no idea.

Like, you know, sometimes you see in the news like, oh, they discovered like this very weird protein that has this anticoagulant aspect or something. And they found it in like a fish that was hiding in the world. So probably there's a lot of things happening too that we have no idea. Especially thinking about like Antarctica and like how the organisms are adapted to live that way.

So, yeah, maybe it's the key for something good hiding. I like that thought. It's very optimistic. Martina, thank you so much for talking with me today. No, it was super fun. To learn more about the Fjord Fido project, check out the link in our episode notes. And if you like this episode, follow us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. That way you'll never miss a new episode.

This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

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