They’re impossible to see with the naked eye. They’re difficult to pronounce.
But coccolithophores, a single-celled plankton, have an outsized effect on oceans due to their sheer quantity — their blooms are visible from space — and because of the fundamental role they play in food chains and the carbon cycle. Small fish and zooplankton feast on them, and they remove huge amounts of carbon from the ocean.
A quarter of the carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere ends up in oceans, where it reacts chemically and makes the water more acidic. This disrupts a variety of marine life, inhibiting some species — including corals, clams and other mollusks — from forming shells and skeletons. So as the threat of ocean acidification, which has emerged as a companion to climate change, looms large, scientists have become concerned that increasing acidification will jeopardize the health of these crucial carbon-absorbing creatures and add another lifeform to the list of species threatened by pollution.
But research published in Nature Communications uncovered good news for coastal varieties of the plankton — those changes in ocean chemistry don’t appear to bother them.
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