The stunning view has now become green gloop!

Phyto-plankton bloom
Green gloop – phytoplankton bloom

AKA the phytoplankton (plant plankton) bloom, it’s as if the green curtains have come down! You can see in the photo below that when the sea is calm, I normally have a fantastic view from my crevice home, but it’s now like green fog (see the photo above)! It’s because the phytoplankton (millions of tiny plants living in the sea) have been growing and multiplying madly! Like the plants in your garden, they need the right conditions to grow. The seawater has now got a little warmer, there is enough light (the days are longer) for lots of photosynthesis and the right amount of nutrients are there so they go wild! These conditions happen every year in the spring, around the first week of May near Plymouth, and less dramatically in the autumn. My view might be spoilt but there is a big up-side to this phytoplankton bloom; lots of food for the zooplankton (animal plankton) to eat and then lots of them for other animals to eat! This all means that there will be plenty of food for my babies that are about to hatch from their eggs. See blog 27/08/2015. They will spend several weeks drifting with the plankton, eating the smaller zooplankton at first then moving onto the larger zooplankton as they grow up a bit.

 

When the green fog is here I have to use my sense of smell to find food as I can’t see very much! Hopefully it will all clear in the next couple of weeks and the divers will be able to come back to see how I’m getting on.

 

For more information about plankton take a look at http://www.lifeadrift.info