Spotlight on plankton, the ocean’s fascinating, bite-sized creatures

Every night, plankton take a journey to shallower waters to feed, prompting predators to follow in search of a very small, but tasty, snack. These images are taken from a new book, Planktonia, illuminating their daily ascent

By Gege Li

DAZZLINGLY unusual, these images of marine creatures, comprising plankton and other organisms, illuminate a journey that happens every day under the cover of darkness – as detailed in the new book, Planktonia: The nightly migration of the ocean’s smallest creatures, by researcher and conservationist Erich Hoyt.

The subtitle refers to the daily underwater ascent undertaken by these tiny, drifting organisms to feed in shallower waters when the sun sets. This prompts predators such as fish and squid to follow in their wake, tempted by the promise of a taste of plankton.

Aside from providing a snack, however, plankton are also globally important: they sustain all life in the ocean by maintaining food webs and producing oxygen and nutrients and many of them sequester carbon dioxide, so help to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Predators of the animal component of plankton, called zooplankton (pictured above, illuminated by an underwater camera), include the tropical two wing flying fish (top image), the hairy goosefish (second image) and the immortal jellyfish (third image), the latter is so named because of its regenerative ability, which may hold clues to human ageing. Despite what you see here, it is only a few millimetres in size.

The images above also shows a larval tripod fish (top image), which is about 2 centimetres long and an eel larva (pictured above), nearly transparent at this early stage of its life. These are both zooplankton, says Hoyt, but “even the zooplankton are often hunting other zooplankton, so they’re all predators in that sense”.