Featured Image Credit: Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA via Wikipedia
By Kira Krall
Zooplankton are tiny and sometimes microscopic marine creatures that float about in every water body on Earth. They make up the largest biomass in the ocean, feed the planet’s largest whales and… pollinate seagrass?
Brigitta van Tussenbroek first suspected zooplankton’s role in pollination when she observed a large diversity of the tiny critters clinging to a species of Caribbean seagrass called turtle grass. van Tussenbroek and her team set up two turtle grass tanks: one with zooplankton and one without. After turning the current off in both tanks, they found that the plants in the tank without zooplankton did not get pollinated.
Until now, the scientific community always assumed that underwater plants were pollinated by underwater currents. While this is still true, pollination for one particular species of seagrass is also done by tiny marine invertebrates known as zooplankton. They move from grass to grass and transfer pollen as they do it.
Sound familiar? It’s exactly what our land-based pollinators do to terrestrial plants. And, just like on land, zooplankton pollinate because they’re attracted to a food source. In this case, turtle grass provides a gooey and carbohydrate-rich substance to the hungry zooplankton.
Watch the fairy-like pollination process below. 1:30 is where the zooplankton really go into action!
Before we declare zooplankton the saviors of seagrass, much more research needs to be done on how many species zooplankton are pollinating. This mutualistic relationship between zooplankton and turtle grass could be a way for turtle grass to increase genetic diversity, or it could be a happy coincidence due to the tasty nature of turtle grass mucous.
Either way, zooplankton is increasing the health of a plant that provides multiple ecosystem services from food, to shelter, to coastline protection. That’s a win for us!
You can read more about the research here, and go here to read the article yourself!