Radiolab - A War We Need

Episode Date: March 6, 2012

Every day, every moment, an epic battle is raging across the globe. It's happening in the ocean. And the evidence is both highly visible and totally hidden, depending on your perspective. In this short, the tale of an arms race involving trillions of sea creatures--and why their struggle is vital to our survival.

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From WN. W.N.Y. C. See? Yes. And NPR. I'm Robert Krollowich. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. And today we're going to talk about global warfare.

A vast. battle across the planet on a scale that is really hard to believe involving trillions of deaths. And yet, we really need this war because without it, I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be here, Jad wouldn't be here, and you may have noticed he isn't here, and it's not because of a war because he had a baby. But before Jad went on paternity leave, we sat down with Ari Daniel Shapiro, and he told us this story. Here it comes. Right, yeah, so here we are at the center for the culture of marine phytoplankton. This is Willie.

Willie Wilson. Willie Wilson is his name? Yeah, that's tough. Just like his grandfather, actually. My dad's William Wilson. There's a long line of William Wilson. Your son? My son is Angus.

But he's Angus William Wilson. I love that guy. Willie works at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine. Okay. And he studies these tiny plant-like creatures that live in the sea called phytoplankton. He keeps them. in a fridge in these little test tubes, half full of kind of a greenish water. Let's have a look at that.

He pulled one out and showed it to me. And it doesn't really look like there's that much going on in there. But actually right at the bottom, you can see what looks like a white... What is it? It's the carnage of war. Oh. In that test tube that Willie's holding are millions of tiny single-celled plants called caca lithophores.

caco, cacolithophores. Yeah, and there are lots of them in the sea. There's probably about 100,000 of these cacolithophores in a teaspoon of sea water. Tell me about the cacolith. Like, what do they look like? They're basically like tiny little translucent balls with a slight tinge of green. But the key thing is there's... The outside of that ball, it has these white plates.

Tiny circular shields of chalk. Because the cacolithophores are fighting for their lives. Fighting with whom? Each other? Viruses. These viruses that are shaped like diamonds. So here's what happens. Imagine you're a cacolithophore.

Floating in the ocean and along comes this diamond-shaped virus. And it jams its diamond tip into you. between these plates and actually get inside the cell. The chinks in the armor. That's right. It's like the chinks in the armor. And the cacolithophore just engulfs it. And the virus thinks, yes, I'm in here. And then it sort of makes straight to the nucleus.

And it's at that moment that the viral takeover begins. The virus kind of hijacks the cellular machinery. That's usually used by the cacolithophor atomic. more cacolithophore stuff, and it starts making more viruses. So inside the cacolithophore now, there are these little diamonds multiplying. Yeah, they're filling up that space. And eventually, all these viruses head out of the cacolithophore. In big belches or?

Like a steady stream of viruses. Wow. And each one of these viruses has the ability to go on and infect another caclythophore. cell. In fact, those cockolithophores in that test tube that Willie showed me, if I shake this, stuck to the bottom a little bit. Those were in the process of dying. You smell that. Yeah, so what you're smelling there, that's the infection. That's dimethyl sulfide is found. So the infection is already occurring in this culture. And when the cockalithophor dies, those white shields kind of fall off the cell. They sort of gradually sort of rain off

over the course of the infection. So as it's dying, after it's, spewed out these viruses, it just sheds its plate, and it kind of, and then it dies. Yeah. And that creates this white chalkiness. Yeah. Well, so this means like the cocalithophores are not doing very well. Well, they've got a couple of tricks up their little calcified sleeves. Sometimes when a virus enters, the cacolithophore will send out a chemical signal.

They're sort of shouting, hey, it's too late for me. But save yourselves. Oh. Oh. And initially, this signal's pretty weak in the water. But as more and more cacolithophores are infected, the chorus of this chemical beacon grows louder and louder. And so the other cells, they hear these messages.

And they change by messing with their DNA a bit. And they go from having those white shields on the outside to having these jaggedy scales. Which we think might be impenestable. Scales instead of these plates. That's right. Yeah, they're like... Why aren't they just scaly all the time?

Because when they're scaly, they can't be the best cacolithophores they can be. They just don't grow as well. So scaly is an adaptation against the viruses. Exactly. And then finally, if all else fails... Program cell death. The cacolithophores just commit suicide. It just shuts down and kills itself to prevent propagation of viruses.

But over time, the viruses have figured out how to... prevent the cell from killing itself. So it delays the death of the cacolithophore for as long as possible to maximize the number of viruses that can get out. Wow, this is serious. Yeah, it's like an arms race. There's a constant battle to be fitter than you were several generations ago. Here's the crazy thing.

This battle is happening all through the surface of the ocean. There are legions of cacolithophores dying all the time and the cacolithophores are shedding their white shields. It's like taking millions of tiny little mirrors and putting them in the surface of the ocean. So many that you can actually see this carnage from space. You can see this from space? Yeah.

You get massive blooms that cover almost the whole of the North Atlantic. when you get this sort of milky bloom that covers anything from, you know, off the west coast of Scotland and their southern Iceland almost all the way to Newfoundland. In the southern hemisphere, you get this sort of massive milkiness that circumnavigates the globe. These vast swirls of milky water curling around islands and continents. And that's all carnage from this battle. billions and billions of soldiers that have fallen in the field that we can view from space.

Probably it's trillions if you're talking on that scale. Yeah, I think. What's after trillions? Quadrillion? You think it's wearing the quadrillions? Just say it, see how it feels. There are quadrillions of soldiers dying. How did that feel?

It felt good. If I were to be an astronaut, how often would I see these sorts of blooms? All the time. somewhere on the planet. Every day, every hour? Every day, every hour. There's going to be a bloom going on somewhere.

You know, a good example is off the Norwegian fjords. They start in the fjords in late April into May time, and then they sort of creep out of the fjords, like this huge living amoeba. Fishermen hate it because the fish can't see the lures, so they can't catch their fish anymore. And as the shields rain off, and fall down to the ocean floor.

They build up and build up over time. Millions of years of sedimentation of these sort of chalk particles. That's actually what led to the creation of the cliffs of Dover, the white cliffs of Dover in England. Shut up, really? Yes. This is sort of geology in action. And not just that.

When the cacolithophores get decimated by the virus, it kind of clears out the ocean for other phytoplankton to bloom. and then they get mowed down by their viruses. And then the cacolithophores might bloom again. And then they get wiped out. And this cycle... I mean, all these battles, I mean, it's all responsible for about half the oxygen that we breathe. Really?

Half the oxygen we breathe? Half the oxygen. Because when the phytoplankton bloom, they take in carbon dioxide and they release a puff of oxygen. And then they're cut down by these viruses, but they grow back up again, and another breath is released. So the whole system is just kind of breathing. People think of the lungs of the planet are the rainforests, and that's kind of half the picture. But every other breath we take comes from the phyroplactin in the ocean that are going through these battles.

going through these battles on a daily basis. So this is a battle that rages every single day, somewhere in our oceans. Yeah, we need the battle to live. Ari, thank you. Sure. Message 10 new. Hi, Radio Lab. My name is Kaylin.

I'm a Radio Lab listener from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing population. enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. End of message.