Dinoflagellate Ceratium with star-shaped Acantharians in the background (Photo: Angelicque White)

During a Pacific Ocean research cruise, Angel White peers into her microscope. The ship rides gentle swells and sways side to side. In her field of view, organisms the size of dust motes rise and fall through their own watery world. “It can be disorienting and enthralling at the same time. The microbes are dying as I look at them, and it doesn’t always make for the best photos,” she says.

White studies plankton, the microorganisms that power the marine food chain, pump oxygen into the atmosphere and regulate global chemical cycles. In the course of her research, she has recorded an astonishing diversity of living shapes, forms, colors and patterns: spiny Radiolarians, fat copepods, football-shaped ostracods and coiled threads of Trichodesmium that coalesce into filamentous balls. Under fluorescent light, her photos reveal organisms within organisms, glowing constellations that rival images from the best space telescopes.

White’s science is strictly down to Earth. The assistant professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences aims to reveal how plankton consume and release nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus and how, in turn, these abundant organisms respond to variations in temperature and water chemistry. Her tools run the gamut from high-tech instruments to old-school nets towed behind a ship. In the lab, her camera has become invaluable in her exploration of a world that is largely invisible to the naked eye.

Three isopods clutch one another (Photo: Angelicque White)

“Photography is a wonderful outlet for creativity and discovery,” she adds. “Plankton show an amazing array of different adaptations to their environment. If you concentrate them in a drop of ocean water and look through the microscope, you will see organisms feeding, swimming, gliding, tumbling and floating. There are blues and reds, jaws and antennae — whole alien worlds.”

Call to Artists

In 2012, 35 Oregon artists took up a call from The Arts Center of Corvallis for works based on White’s plankton images. Submissions came from painters, fabric and glass artists, sculptors, potters and an expert in the ancient Japanese art of stencil dyeing. They comprised a show, The Art of Plankton, Form Follows Function.

The range of art gave White a new view of a world that she has explored through her research. “I’ve been fortunate over the years to look through a microscope and be thrilled with the familiar and the mysterious,” she says. “And now to have a whole range of creative people re-envision what I saw the first time is very cool. The natural world can be astonishingly beautiful.

“The general view is that scientists pick it apart and explain it through cold and methodical equations. It is easy to get lost in the details and lose a sense of wonder. This collaboration — merging the perspectives and talents of artists with science — is refreshing. It reminds me what it was like that first time at sea, the first time I realized that, ‘oh no, really, the ocean teems with life, glorious tiny life.’ That sense of discovery is what I felt talking to the artists.”

Drifters 1, Leah Wilson, Eugene

Leviathan, Rakar West, Eugene

Parum Aqua Flora, Sidnee Snell, Corvallis

Emiliana Coccolithophore, Ella Rhoades, Corvallis

Drifters, Sara McCormick, Portland

Blue Button, Sandra Schock-Houtman, Corvallis

Tondos, Jenny Gray, Corvallis

Benthos, Jerri Bartholomew, Corvallis

The Collection, Chi Meredith, Corvallis

Highest chlorophyll concentrations show as red in this spring 2003 image. The East Coast — Long Island, the Gulf of Maine and Nova Scotia — is to the left. (Image courtesy of the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE)

If you separate predators from their prey, you get more prey. Now that simple relationship has been used to explain one of the most important annual events in the ocean: the North Atlantic spring phytoplankton bloom.

Since the 19th century, oceanographers have sought to explain its origins and have settled on the wintertime mixing of ocean waters followed by increasing light and temperature in the spring, a process known as Sverdrup’s hypothesis.

However, using NASA satellite data, Michael Behrenfeld, OSU professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, reported in 2010 that phytoplankton abundance begins to increase in the depths of winter, well before light and warmth return. He offered another explanation: As winter storms stir the water, predators of phytoplankton get separated from their prey, allowing more of the tiny plants to survive and initiating a bloom that lasts until the end of spring.

Critics who took issue with Behrenfeld’s use of satellite data noted that space-borne sensors capture light from only the ocean surface. However, in a second 2010 paper, Emmanual Boss of the University of Maine and Behrenfeld used additional data from a waterborne “profiling float” that sampled from deep in the ocean to the surface. They reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that float and satellite data are consistent. Phytoplankton begin to rebound in the short, dark days of winter. Move over Dr. Sverdrup.

Behrenfeld’s 2010 report in the journal Ecology is available online: http://bit.ly/aTUM3V.

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