One of the islands I like is Santa Cruz. Not only do we see the work of the Charles Darwin Research Station and the National Park with the breeding of the tortoises, but we also have an opportunity to see these giants in the wild, exploring a local farm where they roar around naturally. We were lucky still to see several ones as very soon they migrate down towards the lower parts of the island, making it too difficult to observe them.
However today I would like to talk more about the other side of the scale of animals: the tiny organisms that float everywhere in the water called plankton.
Plankton is a general term. Planktonic organisms are animals and plants that have such limited powers of locomotion that they are at the mercy of the prevailing water movement. Plankton may be subdivided: phytoplanton are free-floating organisms of the sea that are capable of photosynthesis, zooplankton are the various free-floating animals. We took a plankton sample from the ocean and we put it under the microscope. We observed lots of microorganisms and took a picture of one of them.
In this picture you can observe a shrimp larva. There are many types of larva similar to this, for example the krill, which is the basic food for whales. All these microorganisms spend many months in the ocean before they get to the adult stage. Even these organisms that are so small are very important in the food chain of the sea.
If you have the chance to see the ocean on a dark night you can have a great experience observing these microorganisms brightening up the water because they are able to produce bioluminescence, which they use for reproduction, communication and defense.
