To me, the oceans dance to the tune of chlorophyll.
A textual response to the film of Alice Aires
Dr Brenda Parker, July 2020

From the formidable blooms enveloping the Falkland Islands when the nutrient-rich meltwater departs from Antarctica in the Austral summer, to milky swathes of coccolithophores visible from space, stretching from the west coast of Ireland into the Atlantic. This magnificent system of homeostasis. Our affordance means we empathise with trees more than phytoplankton. Cycles of biotransformation: sulphur, carbon, nitrogen and phosphate.
In contrast to Cousteau’s assertion of the silent ocean, we know now it is a highly noisy place, a veritable rabble. The most important conversations are inaudible to humans. If only we could perceive the drama unfolding. In Alice Aires’ film, the rowdy crowds are juxtaposed, indicating the constant communication between trophic levels of the food chain. Take for example, microalgae and bacteria trading Vitamin B12, using a currency of carbon¹.
There is violence and revenge too. Copepods grazing on phytoplankton induce chain reactions. Infochemicals released by the microalgae cause programmed cell death where the whole bloom commits an act of hara kiri. The copepods, sated on their feast, find themselves rendered infertile because of oxylipins, chemicals produced when diatoms are wounded².
For humans, our staggering inability to comprehend the myriad interactions is never more painfully experienced than in the laboratory. Confronted by complexity, our response is to reduce the rich biodiversity to one or two model organisms. By studying these intensively, we hope to elucidate traits and behaviour that give us insight into the metabolic exchanges taking place. The reductionism that must be applied surely means we lose nuance. Thus we see the paradox, the scientific institution as a place of power is humbled by the sophistication of the ocean. It has been said many times that we know more about the surface of the moon, of mars – take your pick of examples – than the bottom of the sea. However, one organism can contain multitudes.
Amongst the model organisms, Pheodactylum tricornutum holds an incongruously large responsibility. A diatom, existing in marine and brackish waters, has had its genome sequenced, and metabolic pathways extensively probed³. Yet, it remains an outlier even within its own type. Facultative for silica, it lacks the exquisite glass shell of other diatoms. Faced with changing environmental conditions, it changes morphology between pennate, triradiate and oval shapes⁴.
The more questions we ask Phaeo, the more we realise we as humans are inadequate to understand a single-celled organism, never mind the ecological web and biogeochemical cycles in which they exist.
This enigmatic organism happens to also be the one I use for most of my work on applied phycology. As a biochemical engineer I am interested in how we scale up manufacturing processes using photosynthetic systems. I make use of the fact it can accommodate brackish to saline water and praise this ability to resist fluctuating conditions in the bioreactor. Under conditions of nutrient starvation it remodels its metabolism, converting carbon into valuable lipids. We are constantly re-purposing biology for our own ends. In my work we also investigate the ability of algae to take up heavy metals such as cadmium. Using Phaeo, we try to design systems to remediate the results of anthropogenic activity. Yet, the ability to take up this heavy metal is based on a “natural” phenomena where cadmium is distributed and cycled within the oceans⁶.
Together with architect Heather Ring and designer Synnøve Fredericks, our project Algaegarden, took a similar approach to isolate individual species in order to invite a closer dialogue[1]. We aimed to create a narrative environment where the role of the human was to supply air for carbon dioxide, and mixing by interacting with the installation by pushing air pumps and watching bubbles race through the hanging tubes. To order an organism from a culture collection is to know the providence: the rockpool it was isolated from, by whom and what year. Our installation sought to amplify a selected number of individual species of algae, the posing argument was that if you knew it was there, and you understood it better, then you might care for it more. Each alga had a story. We had golden brown Pavlova lutheri, supplied by a local aquaculture company who used it to feed oysters at a hatchery; a Barbie-pink Porphyridium purpureum because of the pigment phycoerythrin, and CPCC 90 – the same species of Chlorella vulgaris used by Emerson to calculate the quantum yield of photosynthesis.
The idea of care and how our anthropogenic activity is changing our oceans is exemplified through the discovery of the recalcitrance of microplastic waste. What mankind strives for with plastics is to evade the microbial world, to have the picture of Dorian Gray. It is at odds with the equilibrium of cycles of deconstruction and reformation. With plastics, we have been striving to create a material that defies the laws of decay. In nature, the properties of toughness are afforded by cellulose. The most abundant polymer on the planet is resilient yet designed for decay by other organisms.
One strange but fascinating set of organisms are the salps, a set of marine tunicates that employ a tangential flow filtration mechanism to consume algae in blooms, depositing vast amounts of carbon to the sea floor as marine snow⁷. Wearing a cloak of cellulose known as the “tunic” they swim in tandem. (This choreography of aquatic life is something I explored during the Swimmers project[2] with artist Carole Dumoulin, splicing footage of synchronised swimmers with video footage captured in the lab.) Salps are some of the ocean’s most efficient filter feeders and are a source of bioinspiration for engineers wishing to emulate the mechanism of particle capture. What has been discovered is that microplastics are all pervasive, and are now ingested by salps⁸. Their role has now become a vector of another form of petroleum-derived carbon, sending our sad legacy to the seafloor.
Jean Painlevé’s films on marine life played an important role in education. His work fused art and science by experimenting with the nature of music and sound to accompany visuals and narration. In Alice’s work we see the digital realm used to speculate on the future of our marine environment. This will bring the oceans to us, via our devices, with the goal of increasing our empathy towards the unseen but interconnected.

Bibliography
1. Kazamia, E., Helliwell, K. E., Purton, S. & Smith, A. G. How mutualisms arise in phytoplankton communities: building eco-evolutionary principles for aquatic microbes. Ecol. Lett. 19, 810–822 (2016).
2. Bidle, K. D. Programmed Cell Death in Unicellular Phytoplankton. Curr. Biol. 26, R594–R607 (2016).
3. Bowler, C. et al. The Phaeodactylum genome reveals the evolutionary history of diatom genomes. Nature 456, 239–44 (2008).
4. Song, Z., Lye, G. J. & Parker, B. M. Morphological and biochemical changes in Phaeodactylum tricornutum triggered by culture media: Implications for industrial exploitation. Algal Res. 47, 101822 (2020).
5. Horst, I. et al. Treatment of Phaeodactylum tricornutum cells with papain facilitates lipid extraction. J. Biotechnol. 162, 40–9 (2012).
6. Lane, T. W. & Morel, F. M. A biological function for cadmium in marine diatoms. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 97, 4627–31 (2000).
7. Sutherland, K. R., Madin, L. P. & Stocker, R. Filtration of submicrometer particles by pelagic tunicates. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 107, 15129–34 (2010).
8. Brandon, J. A., Freibott, A. & Sala, L. M. Patterns of suspended and salp‐ingested microplastic debris in the North Pacific investigated with epifluorescence microscopy. Limnol. Oceanogr. Lett. 5, 46–53 (2020).

[1] Algaegarden - Metis International Garden Festival, Quebec, CA (2011-13). Wayward Plants in collaboration with Synnøve Fredericks and Brenda Parker
[2] Swimmers- Hmn, London 2015: Carole Dumoulin and Brenda Parker