Jellyfish may be Stirring the Ocean

How the tiniest marine organisms can stir up the oceons.

How the tiniest marine organisms can stir up the oceons.

A pair of aeronautic scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say they have shown how marine organisms ranging in size from tiny copepods to krill to jellyfish—known collectively as zooplankton—could play a vital role in stirring up the ocean. Three years ago, marine scientists in Canada showed how plankton generated a good deal of turbulence in a coastal inlet as they migrated up and down the water column. They suggested that on a global scale, this could have a significant effect on ocean mixing. The notion intrigued Dr John Dabiri, who heads the new study. He did some homework and uncovered a 50-year-old theory on ocean mixing by the grandson of Charles Darwin. Darwin had proposed a mechanism in which ‘the organism drags the surrounding fluid as it goes.’ Using fluid-dynamics modelling techniques, Dabiri and colleague Kakani Katija showed that Darwin’s mechanism was at play in the movement of these small organisms, and the efficiency of Darwin’s process depends more on the shape of the object and the thickness of the liquid than on the object’s size. Which means these tiny organisms can stir the ocean.

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