The Bismarck Tribune Newspaper, January 6, 1934, Page 6

sf UUEE AE UTeraasveyneevre ar THT TTT H--Toop % Att MANKIND (plo T> -WOING ASTE Sn , Rall; 4% Sea a MDS TTTTTONCTCTTT TATA TTT ATT ENousG ", oe = S = = S 2 mM HUNUMUNAAITA EN TUAEAO ERAT TASTE ANU UANASUUCUOETOGENNAGAA MANU soppy Ayr narteem msn ACSA AT The Atlantic alone is estimated to have the equivalent of 20,000 world wheat harvests---in such dissolved form, however, that living things can't get hold of it — or J Bere Uf Father Neptune cared to have a ban- quet, his mermaids could bring him an endless succession of “meat and potato” dishes—all culled feem the sca water. By Dr. Frank Thone ILL Old Ocean swallow all the food > Is Father Neptune a miserly hoarder, locking up in his vast cupboard a gradually accumulating pile of po- tential meat and bread, so fixed that neither man nor beast nor fish nor plant can ever make use of it? Will the sea, which many believe to be the original cradle of all life, eventually become the grave of all life? Questions pointing in this direction were re- cently asked before an international meeting of scientists in Chicago by Dr. August Krogh of Copenhagen, a noted physiologist. How much energy that can be used for the purpose of life, Dr. Krogh inquired, is to be found in the ocean, and how large a fraction of that total is “‘unavailable"—locked up in such forms that living things cannot get hold of it? The figures for the “lost” food in the ocean which Dr. Krogh has reached through experiment and cal- eclation are astonishmg, and may well be alarming. The Atlantic Ocean alone, he estimates, has the equiva- lent of 20,000 times the whole world’s annual wheat crop locked up in dissolved foods which no known plant or animal life in the sea can make use of. The method by which this astonishing total was reached shows an interesting combination of ex- perimental ingenuity and sweeping imagination in the mind of the Danish scientist. THUAN AAA ONEONTA A GR ev TT IRST he analyzed samples of sea water from the Atlantic, until he found that their chemical make-up was very nearly uniform, no matter at what depth they were taken. That simplified matters considerably; he did not have to allow for depth changes in his later calcu- lations. ‘Then he determined, by quite difficult chem- ical processes, how much combined nitrogen, or protein material, there was in a cubic meter of it. (A cubic meter is alittle more than a cubic. yerd.) The total protein-stuft in a cubic meter fig- ured out, Dr. Krogh next subtracted all of it that was represented by animals and plants that could be strained out, ranging in size from mi- croscopic one-celled creatures to good-sized fishes. He allowed also for such monsters as whales and sharks, that are not found in any given average cubic meter of sea water. The difference between the total protein ma- terial and the “organized” protein in the organ- isms represented the life-stuft actually dissolved in the water, and, for the time being at least, not in use by anything or anybody. This figured out as'1.5 grams (about 1-20 of an ounce) VUE ALUNEUAnnnectnAt te feetarelemmHd et UR AHAUELA TRUE UAL UTA Here are two diatoms, the drifting open sea plants which are the ultimate source of almost all food eaten by sea MT to a cubic meter—not so very concentrated. By a similar process, Dr. Krogh determined that the average amount of carbohydrate in ocean water is 3.9 grams (about 2-15 of an ounce) to a cubic meter. If we figure protein as meat and carbohydrate as potato—really a pretty close representation of their chemical na- ture, at that—it becomes pretty obvious why the dissolved foods in the sea water are not being used. QOne-twentieth of an ounce of meat and two-hfteenths of an ounce of potato in over a cubic yard of water make a mighty thin soup. Not much nourishment in it for any- body, even a tiny germ. creatures. oe there is a most appalling quantity of that thin soup. The Atlantic Ocean alone has an area of about 90,000,000 square kilo- meters, or 35,000,000 square miles. Its mean depth is 4000 meters, or roughly 13,000 feet. Put that through your calculating machine, and you come out with something like a quad- rillion (a million times a million) cubic meters. All that cold salt water holding dissolved, in each cubic meter, a nibble of meat, a small bite of potato! Not remarkable, then, that the old Atlantic has locked up in its meager cupboard the food- equivalent of 20,000 world wheat harvests. It you like to juggle with endless strings of ciphers, you might try adding in the much bigger Pa- cific and the rest of the oceans. Is all this dissolved food actually useless? Isn't there anything, any class of animals in the whole vast. ocean, that can get some: good out of it? The very notion of 20,000 wasted wheat harvests runs against ‘the streak o° Scotch that is in even the least thrifty of us. Tt doesn’t leok as though there were. Other - scientists besides Dr. Krogh have puzzled theit heads over that ‘problent of ‘the ‘apparent ‘awful waste of the ocean, and some of them have sug: gested various types of animal life—protozoa, sponges, even fishes—as.able to soak up their nourishment directly out of the dissolved food- stuffs in the water. - flow into them, and they also offer foothold «land, via rivers, blown dust, and showers of D® KROGH will net commit himself to a declaration that they can’t. But he remains skeptical. Some experiments of his own have indicated that certain forms of water life can take up dissolved foods directly: from the water; but they also threw in a joker: the same animals lost food materials to the water faster than they took food out. What is the source of this vast store of “lost” food? Where does it come from—how it is * made? For the most part it is made in the ocean itself, and by inhabitants of the ocean. It is the product of minute plants that float in the sunlit water near the surface; for the most part the group of plants known as diatoms, “the grass of the sea.”” Where conditions are favorable for their growth they multiply rapidly and the water is thick with them, so that the sea is green. Blue, the natural color of sea water, betokens few diatoms, an empty sea, a desert sea. In reckoning the life of the ocean, one should leave out of account the inshore waters and the shallow seas. These properly belong to the continents. They receive special gifts of min- erals and organic debris from the rivers that in order to live. for seaweed and animal life. But the open ocean is not thus dependent on the crusts that fall from the table of the land. Except for the mineral gifts from the ash from volcanic eruptions, the open ocean needs to thank the land for little. Its inhabi- tants make their own lives, As deep into the ocean as sunlight can pen- etrate, plants live. Like land plants, these minute plants of the ocean, the diatoms, cannot live without light. With the aid of light, they, like land, plants, take carbon dioxide and water and fashion them into food: carbohydrates first, the energy foods, then with the addition of nitrogen the proteins, the muscle foods. (Copyright, 1983, by EveryWeek Magesine and Science Service—Printed in U. &. AUER MN This plant life in the ocean swarms thickest near the surface. bers of diatoms are right at the surface, where the sunlight is strongest. Anyway, the top lilies, are lacerlike relatives of stay-fishes, 600 fect or s0 of the water contains practically tuned upside down on their stems. all the plant life of the ocean, and the next These and many other things on the still 600 feet below that contains all the rest. almost unknown floor of the sea. And they Tt is interesting to note that practically all must all eat. On what do they feed in those the plant life of the open ocean is one-celled, barren and lifeless depths? microscopic. Nothing anywhere near as big Dr. Krogh: says frankly that he doesn't as a tree, practically nothing as big as aclump know. In the first place, before the table is of grass. Why? set, one must count the guests; and as yet we First, the ceaseless motion of the waves and really have no statistical knowledge of life in currents would not permit the growth of large the ocean Dr. Krogh is inclined to be- plants; they would tear them to pieces. Then lieve that the population of the cark world there is the absorption surface advantage that down there is rather scant: nets and traps low- goes with small size. The little fellow can ered into the deeper’ waters bring up strange live best ona thin diet. creatures, but not many of them; a trawl-net Another advantage that small size gives the dragged: along the bottom until it has scraped diatom, in Dr. Krogh’s opinion, is that it slows an area as big as a comfeld will bring up per- down their rate of sinking. haps a couple of hundred animals of all kinds. These tiny plants have no aids to flotation -. ~ ' that we know about. As soon as they come into existence they begin to sink. But since they are so small the water offers-more resist- ance to their sinking, and they can stay i the all-necessary sunlight near the surface long enough to carry on their part in the food-making cycle. ee these tiny plants are fed upon by all manner of almost equally tiny animals, Most of these animals are one-celled like themselves—they are the protozoa. But there are also swarms of others, some of them barely visible to:the naked eye, some still microscopic, that are more complex. Many of these are. minute relatives of crabs and lobsters. These feed alike on the plants and on the protozoa, and in their turn become the prey of larger animals of their own kind or of small Larger fishes eat them, and are themselves eaten by still larger ones, or by the giant squid that the - sperm whales feed upon. It is an endless cycle of eating and being eaten. Down this zone of ceaseless kill- and-be-killed drift the-diatoms as they grow older. If they are not eaten, they dissolve. Their life-stuff, their protoplasm, dies and At the left is one of sca creatures which feed on filters out through. their hard silica shells, the smaller plant and animal forms, which in their stored food-reserve of oil is dissipated, turn wa enie by larger fal $0 pel dintoms exe at last even the silica shells dissolve in the eventually built up into whale flesh. . . . Above all-claiming sea. The dead diatom has con- is one of the hideous which exist—no one ‘ its bi * quite knows asia bottom of the sea, tried oe to the ocean's vast kettle of ibly thin soup. 5 as i But though the diatom lives in the top vhs food-making activity of plants is basic, thousand feet or so of the ocean, and di indispensable, in the cycle of life whether solves before it sinks far beneath it, there is on land or in the ocean; for animals cannot life, very varied life, all the way to the bot- make their own foods but must eat plants, or tom. And on the ocean floor itself there is other animals that have first eaten the plants, life. Strange, crawling, spidery, long-legged Usually the greatest num- I MTA gy ; a CEE AE RR vcs ter > H i