Another plane book from my travels in January, this one is MIT anthropologist Stefan Helmriech’s travels and adventures with marine macrobial biologists in and under the oceans. Some great stuff about what’s happening in Woods Hole and Monterey.
The takeaway is that the macrobial life in the ocean is much vaster and more complex that we’ve hitherto imagined. A mililiter of sea water “in a genetic sense, has more complexity than the human genome” (53).
It’s also a story about the shifting of human interest in marine life away from anthropomorphic mammals, from whales to dolphins and now to microbes (5-6).
Some comments also remind me that I need to re-read Lem’s novel Solaris.
Didn’t scientists discover several new realms or species of microbes in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, a nation at mid-depth whose population exploded right after the spill due to conditions in the water chemistry and then turned ravenously upon the oil.