Phytoplankton

Imagine floating in the warm, sunny parts of the big blue ocean. It’s quiet and bright, and the water gently rocks you back and forth. You are surrounded by life, but some of the most important living things here are completely invisible. I am one of them. I am so tiny that you would need a special tool called a microscope to see me, but there are zillions and zillions of us swirling in the water. We are like tiny, floating plants. Just like a flower in a garden, we do something amazing with sunlight. We soak it up and use its energy to make something that every single person and animal needs for every single breath they take. We may be small, but our job is gigantic. Hello. We are Phytoplankton.

For most of history, people had no idea we were here. They sailed on top of us and swam right through us, but we were a secret world hidden in every drop of water. Then, in the 1670s, a very curious man in a country called the Netherlands had an idea. His name was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and he loved to look at things up close. He built a powerful magnifying glass, which was one of the very first microscopes. One day, he put a single drop of pond water under his lens and peered through it. He gasped. The water was not empty at all. It was a busy city filled with tiny, swimming, wiggling creatures. He was one of the first people ever to see me. It took a long time for scientists to understand what he had found. Later, in the 1800s, other scientists gave my family a name. They called us 'plankton,' which is a word that means 'wanderer,' because we don't swim on our own but drift wherever the ocean currents take us. They also learned that we are the very first link in the ocean’s food chain. We are the super-snack that gets the whole ocean party started.

We wanderers have two of the most important jobs on the entire planet. First, we are breath-makers. By soaking up the sun, we create more than half of all the oxygen on Earth. Take a deep breath. Now take another one. One of those breaths came from us. Our second job is to be the ocean's lunch. We are food for so many sea animals, from tiny little shrimp to the biggest blue whales. Today, scientists and even astronauts in space can see us. Starting in the 1970s, special cameras on satellites began taking pictures of Earth. In those pictures, you can see huge groups of us swirling in the ocean like beautiful green and blue paint. It’s a colorful reminder that even though we are very small, we phytoplankton have a giant job. By taking care of our oceans, you are taking care of us, and the whole world, too.