Sea Life You Can’t See: The Beauty of Ocean Microbes Revealed
VIBRANT OCEAN: A CBIOMES model incorporates information about the physics of ocean dynamics, the chemistry of nutrient distribution, and the biology of the microbial ecosystem to produce a global map of marine microbial communities at 18-kilometer resolution. The Venn diagram at the upper right shows how colors on the map correspond to different combinations of four groupings of marine microbes.
Credit: Oliver Jahn
MICROBIAL MODEL: Even CBIOMES’ simplified models of ocean microbial life can generate extraordinary complexity.
Here, a machine-learning tool has distilled one model’s output into a three-dimensional representation of the abundance of 51 types of microbes. Each colored streak represents a different ocean province with a consistent phytoplankton community.
Credit: Maike Sonnewald
A SINGLE DROP: The ocean’s microbial ecosystem, as captured in this magnified droplet of seawater, comprises a diverse array of phytoplankton, bacteria and viruses that make complementary contributions to the dynamics of ocean life. Phytoplankton capture sunlight and use its energy to build up organic matter, while bacteria, in turn, break organic matter back down into its constituents. Viruses, meanwhile, inject a much-needed dose of genetic variability into microbes that reproduce asexually.
Credit: Jed Fuhrman
GOING WITH THE FLOW: A CBIOMES mathematical model, overlaid on satellite measurements of local sea level north of Hawai‘i, shows the extent to which nearby water particles spread apart over time. In the deep blue sections, nearby particles tend to remain close together. Near each whitish swirl, by contrast, particles disperse rapidly along the track of the swirl, but not across it.
Credit: Mohammad Ashkezari
NOT SO BARREN: The phytoplankton in this image, filtered and condensed from a vial of seawater, come from one of the most barren parts of the ocean, about 100 miles north of Hawai‘i. “Even here, in one of the places with the lowest amounts of nutrients, there is incredible diversity,” Dutkiewicz says.
Credit: Chris Follet
MICROBE MAJESTY: Marine microbes take a breathtakingly diverse array of forms. Here, each point of the star is an individual diatom that has united with the others to form a spiny conglomeration unpalatable to potential predators. The image in the middle shows dinoflagellates, a form of marine plankton, coexisting with chains of diatoms, glass-shelled organisms that Dutkiewicz calls “the most charismatic” of the marine microbes. The bottom image shows a close-up of one dinoflagellate called Pyrocystis, while the image on the opposite page shows a top view of several pillbox-shaped diatoms.
Credit: E. Virginia Armbrust Lab
DINOFLAGELLATES, a form of marine plankton, coexist with chains of diatoms, glass-shelled organisms that Dutkiewicz calls “the most charismatic” of the marine microbes.
Credit: E. Virginia Armbrust Lab
PYROCYSTIS, a kind of dinoflagellate.
Credit: E. Virginia Armbrust Lab
CIRCLES OF LIFE: Pillbox-shaped diatoms.
Credit: Colin Jacob-Vaillancourt
VIBRANT OCEAN: A CBIOMES model incorporates information about the physics of ocean dynamics, the chemistry of nutrient distribution, and the biology of the microbial ecosystem to produce a global map of marine microbial communities at 18-kilometer resolution. The Venn diagram at the upper right shows how colors on the map correspond to different combinations of four groupings of marine microbes.
Credit: Oliver Jahn
From comb jellies to sea anemones, ocean life takes one dazzling form after another. While some of these creatures are familiar from walks on the beach or nature shows, many of the most beautiful and fascinating ocean life-forms exist on a scale too small for the human eye to see. Individually, these microscopic organisms are imperceptible. But collectively, they have an outsize impact on ocean life and the global climate, forming the base of the ocean food chain and mediating the cycles of carbon, nitrogen and other key nutrients throughout the ocean.
These diverse microbes interact with one another in a dynamic dance across time and space. The Simons Collaboration on Computational Biogeochemical Modeling of Marine Ecosystems (CBIOMES) seeks to build mathematical models that chart every detail of this dance — from the individual rules that govern what each type of microbe needs to thrive to the structure of the large-scale microbial communities captured in satellite imagery.
The models are as beautiful as the microbes themselves, says Stephanie Dutkiewicz, a CBIOMES investigator and a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We reduce that incredible complexity to a simplicity that sometimes shocks the people who study it.” And when the team adds some of the complexity back in, she says, “we end up with incredible richness.”
