Sometimes, the grim reapers within the natural world consequently serve the greater good. In this case, the dealer of death is a simple yet ostensibly potent dinoflagellate.
“There’s a ‘ruthless predator’ in the ocean that harpoons its prey,” foments the ever-trusted BBC’s Wildlife Magazine, relishing in suspenseful delivery that “It’s not a shark, a squid, or even an ambush predator like the venomous stonefish but a type of predatory plankton called Polykrikos kofoidii.”
Sharks, squid, and stonefish, scuttle aside. This little yet well-appendaged plankton wheels and deals under the cover of night aided only by its own built-in flickering glow, harpooning the toxic algae that fuels Southern California’s red tides and swallowing them whole.
Marine biologists at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently collected water samples from beneath Scripps Pier in La Jolla, and while investigating the peculiar, full-body bioluminescence of P. kofoidii, discovered their consumption of the species mostly associated with red-tide algal blooms, Lingulaulax polyedra, might suggest something.
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The details might get a bit granular for the average reader (and scribe) of this page—P. kofoidii also flashes a dimmer light than most other bioluminescent plankton—but the benefits of the presence of these nearly microscopic critters are obvious and immeasurable.
“We are still investigating why and how this organism uses such an unusual setup and whether this trait is found in other understudied dinoflagellates,” says a co-author of the recently published study on the findings (in Journal of Phycology), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) postdoctoral researcher Brittany Sprecher.
Getting a grip on this newly defined degree of bioluminescence “could lead to a better understanding of marine ecosystems, as well as the evolution, chemistry and potential functions of bioluminescence,” Sprecher adds.
“In terms of applications,” posits Scripps marine biologist and co-author Dimitri Deheyn, “could P. kofoidii be used to help manage toxic algal blooms that are known to devastate coastal economies? It’s possible that growing large cultures could point to future solutions.”
On the one hand, this sounds like a b-rate sci-fi horror flick. On the other, every day a red tide is kept at bay is another day on the surf calendar.
Onward and upward with the sciences.
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