WTN: plankton
James Harbeck
plankton
Imagine you’re a right whale. Left to your own devices, you wander around the oceans, filter-feeding and taking it as it comes. No planked salmon for you, just plankton: copepods, krill, pteropods… the true drifters of the ocean, riding the current from past to future until they are baled by your baleen: a live-and-let-die diet. They’re not chewy; they’re so small, they’re indistinguishable from foam (and not the kind that’s gotten tired on Michelin menus – just the sea foam you see foam on the sea). You could have ten million in a dessertspoon of saltwater. In one baleen-filtered rightfully right full right whale mouth you could have as many microscopic life forms as there are whales and humans hosted by our whole planet, all brought together by circumstance, not a phalanx but just a huddled mass.
You could also have that as a human, if you were to drink seawater. But don’t. It will make you sick. Among the plankton are not just vanishingly small shrimp-looking and flea-looking and jelly-looking things but also mightily many bacteria and viruses, not to mention far too much salt for a human gut. Plankton is, after all, a whole class of thing: any kind of small living thing that drifts in the ocean, ranging from the micrometre scale to the centimetre scale – even a jelly or squid relative that is carried willy-nilly by currents counts as a plankter. It only matters that it not motivate volitionally in counteraction to currents.
The definition of plankton – and indeed the word itself (and the individual plankter) – was created in 1887 by the German marine biologist Victor Hensen. Plankton is, tout court, organisms that drift; the word is from Ancient Greek πλαγκτός (transliteration plagtós but phonologically plaŋktós), which means ‘drifter’ or ‘wandering’, from πλάζω (plázō) ‘I wander’.
Wander? Hmm, I wonder. There is another Greek word for ‘wander’: πλανάω (planáō), and it seems as though it could and should be related to πλάζω but it’s not clear how – the phonological transformation required is troublesome. Perhaps the two simply drifted together. It’s a big enough planet…
…and, by the way, planet comes from πλανάω because the planets (Mars, Venus, etc.) were seen by early astronomers to wander in the sky. Of course now we know that our own island home is also a planet like those others, and also that they are not wandering aimlessly; they are carried by the currents of gravity, swirling in the eternal gradual gravitational whirlpool of a star. Physics! We are all plankton, from the galactic to the Planck length.
What is the Planck length? It’s a short walk; before you know it you’re in the foam. Planck distances are the smallest conceivable distances in space and time; the Planck length is so small a hundred quintillion fit in a proton, and even the smallest bit of plankton is a whole universe, relatively. To quote David Mermin, “spacetime becomes a foam at the Planck scale.” It’s the great class equalizer, invented by Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck – or, as he called himself from childhood on, Max Planck. (Why Planck? It seems that – to abridge a prolix peroration – his ancestors lived near a bridge, i.e., a plank across a stream. And plank, as it happens, traces back through the seven seas of European languages to Greek φάλαγξ, phalanx, which names a wooden board, or a mass of infantry arrayed for battle, or one bone of a finger.)
Well. That’s all a whale of a tale, isn’t it? But it’s not just a tale of a whale. In this ever-changing world in which we’re living, we all intake our share of plankton. After all, it’s not just adrift in saltwater; a dessertspoon of tapwater will likely have some too, as everything carries myriads of myriads of microscopic beasties, just drifting. The air does, too: aeroplankton includes viruses, bacteria, fungi, and even pollen and similar plant propagations. And of course aerosols; if you sit in a space with other people, they will exhale not just aeroplankton but microscopic water drops with various entities in them, and you will inhale some in turn (unless you’re wearing a well-fitted N95, and even then a few may pass through). They drift into you as you drift on this planet, whether wandering in the woods or tapping into the daily phalanx of the digital sea. Such is the foam of time and space, the walk we are planked on.
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