NZGeo: Message in a bottle

The most numerous animals on the planet are not wildebeest, nor beetles, but microscopic plants and animals collectively called plankton.

Scoop up a bucket of seawater and peer in. You won’t see much. But there could well be millions of individual “plankters” in that one bucket. Now try your maths on this: There are 100 billion buckets in a cubic kilometre of ocean. And well over a billion cubic kilometres of ocean on the planet. It can be hard to fathom such numbers, but think about millions and billions with this in mind: a million seconds is 12 days, a billion seconds is 32 years.

PHOTO: Richard Robinson

The ocean is not empty. It is a heaving, writhing, vast medium of life. Most of it is made up of plants and animals so tiny that they cannot be seen by the naked eye.

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