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In France, after two years at sea and 70,000 km traveled south of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to study microorganisms, the scientific boat Tara will return today to her home port, Lorient, in the west of France. On the occasion of this return and the celebration of Science, workshops are organized throughout the weekend, in particular to introduce children to this “invisible people of the ocean” and their role in the “climate machine” as to these students from Landaul, a town not far from Lorient.
A sample of seawater placed under this digital microscope connected to a tablet and dozens of microorganisms appear on the screen: ” There, you can’t see, there are little legs.
Jules, Chiara and their comrades are on the lookout to recognize larvae, copepods or coscinodiscus. Children’s reaction: Zooplankton are micro-animals, there is phytoplankton, algae…”, “In a small drop of water, it’s huge what you can see”, “It means that you swim in that”, “And if we say to ourselves that when we drink the cup, we drink all that ».
Telling the influence of man
To discover this people of the oceans, invisible to the naked eye, to tell their key role in the food chain, but also to understand how human beings have altered certain balances, that is the objective of this workshop. Noan Le Bescot, from the Plankton Planet scientific consortium: “ The fact of showing them that in water, we obviously find living things, but we also find, for example, microplastics. It is very common to find blue-colored fibers very much related to the masks that we have worn following this period of Covid. Seeing it with your own eyes is different than just hearing it.”
Another example: the coccolithophores, these micro-algae which have more and more difficulty in making their limestone skeleton. In question, the acidification of the oceans which is linked to our CO2 emissions.
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