[♪ INTRO]
Thanks for letting me use your microscope Squeaks!
I wanted to look at the sand we collected
when we were out playing by the pond.
Look, I'll put what I can see through the microscope up on the screen!
You can see teeny shells and lots of little crystals!
[Squeaks squeaks]
Oh sure! We can look at that pond water you collected,
and maybe figure out why it's green!
Oh wow, look at all that green stuff!
This water is full of living things.
Do you know what those are?
Those are called phytoplankton!
And they’re really important to all living things.
Phytoplankton are a type of plankton—which is just
a fancy science word for the super small things that live in water.
Most of them are so small, you need a microscope like this to see them.
And some phytoplankton are tiny plants.
But there are also other kinds, including special types of bacteria.
They’re different from the germ bacteria you might have heard about
that can get into cuts and scrapes and get you sick.
These bacteria can’t live inside our bodies.
Instead, like other phytoplankton, they just float around
in bodies of water, from ponds to lakes and even oceans.
In fact, there can be tens of thousands of them
in a single cupful like this.
And that’s usually a good thing, because
they’re kind of like miniature plants.
See, trees, bushes, and those green phytoplankton in your pond water
all do something called photosynthesis.
That’s where they take light from the sun and use it to make food for themselves.
And when they do this, they also make oxygen —
which is an ingredient in our air that we need to breathe!
[Squeaks squeaks quizzically]
Yeah! Exactly!
Every time you take a deep breath — you’re breathing in oxygen!
Just like all the plants that live on land,
those tiny phytoplankton make that oxygen.
In fact, there are so many phytoplankton that every year,
they make half or more of all of the oxygen that’s made.
And that’s especially cool since, if you were to weigh
all the phytoplankton in the world and all the land plants,
the land plants would weigh 450 times more!
[Squeaks squeaks excitedly]
I know, right?
That’s a lot of oxygen coming from such little creatures!
They’re actually why we have oxygen to breathe in the first place.
A really long time ago, there wasn’t really oxygen in the air.
Then, some plankton started using that photosynthesis process
we talked about, so they started making oxygen.
That oxygen built up over millions of years—so most of the oxygen
that’s now in the air came from phytoplankton!
How cool is that?!
So any time you take a deep breath… you can thank phytoplankton!
Now, that’s not the only reason phytoplankton are so great.
They’re also really important to everything that lives in the water
with them, because they’re an important source of food.
[Squeaks squeaks confusedly]
I know, they’re really small, so they don’t seem
like they’d fill you up much.
But there are animals that are really small, too,
like certain kinds of fish and shrimp.
They eat phytoplankton like we might eat carrots or celery.
Then those little animals are eaten by bigger ones,
which are eaten by bigger ones, and so on.
So without phytoplankton, there wouldn’t be small animals,
which means there wouldn’t be food for big animals.
And our ponds, lakes, and oceans would be a lot more empty!
[Squeaks squeaks quizzically]
Oh yeah! The animals in the pond depend on these little phytoplankton.
So I think it’s a great idea to put them back.
How about I come with you?
I want to see all the other amazing creatures living in the pond with them!
So goodbye for now!
If you want to keep learning and having fun with Squeaks and me,
hit the subscribe button, and we'll see you next time
here at The Fort!
[♪ OUTRO]