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An unseen war rages between the ocean’s tiniest organisms, and it has significant implications for understanding the ocean’s role in climate change, according to a new study. Researchers sampled water off the coast of Southern California over the course of five months, almost every day shortly after an algal bloom occurred, and found that the cloud of microorganisms is anything but uniform.
Instead, they found traces of a constant battle between dozens of species, with the fortunes of war favoring different organisms on a daily basis. Not only do the tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, make up the base of the food chain in the ocean but they are also the planet’s main scrubbers of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.Image credit: David Needham and Jed Fuhrman/USC
