Tiny marine animals may be more powerful than you would think. A new study has proposed that the plankton that move across the ocean in thick layers collectively produce currents that affect nutrients, heat and salt in the water, National Geographic reported.
Back in 2009, study co-author John Dabiri and a colleague discovered that jellyfish can shift water over distances by dragging a "halo" of water along with them when they move.
"This was the first hint that animals could transport water over distances much longer than their body size," said Dabiri, as quoted by National Geographic.
Publishing their findings Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids, Dabiri and study co-author Monica Wilhelmus used brine shrimp for their research, studying how the movement of the tiny animals affected the water around them.
The swirls of water created by the tiny "sea monkeys" were much larger than their adult size, which is about half an inch in length.
"My friends who are physical oceanographers have a healthy skepticism of [this] idea," Dabiri noted, saying that he was surprised by the findings as well. "But you have to remember that there are billions of [plankton] in the ocean, and the whole is greater than its parts."
For future research, Dabiri plans to look at ocean stratification, factoring in the sea's layers of water.
The laboratory experiment may not scale up to ocean size due to the way the sea is stratified into denser and lighter layers, said Christian Noss, an environmental physicist at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany.
"To me, an interesting aspect of this work is to see animals that seem to be at the mercy of the water play a role in shaping their own environment," said Dabiri, as quoted by National Geographic. "It's something that we hadn't appreciated, but these experiments are showing [that this] might be a common occurrence in the ocean."
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