"Ambivalent" Made from Ocean Plastic, part of my series "The Gardens Below"
This series had been a celebration of the biodiversity below the ocean. Perhaps at first it seems to draw your mind towards plant life because of the word "gardens".
However it's not that simple below the surface of the ocean.
The gardens below are little more ambivalent than that of on land.
At first glance many things in the sea may appear to be "like a flower" but are in fact animals.
In the microscopic world in the ocean things can be even more fascinating...
Here's a little extract I found online which help explain things better than I probably could 😅
On land, plants make ltheir own food by photosynthesis and animals live by eating. However, in the microscopic world in the oceans, it is not that simple. Many microscopic so-called plants (phytoplankton) can also eat like animals and many microscopic so-called animals (microzooplankton) can also photosynthesize like plants! More amazingly, some of these microzooplankton eat tiny phytoplankton and continue to live off photosynthesis from those ingested phytoplankton. These organisms acting like both plants and animals are called mixotrophs because they mix (combine) different ways of getting nutrition. These fascinating creatures are not rare freaks of nature, but are very common.
The inspiration for the 9th in my series "The Gardens Below" was by Pippa Ehrlich, @the_rewilding
Pippa is a marine conservation journalist and filmmaker.
She was the co-director and editor behind the Oscar winning movie, My Octopus Teacher. Which transported many people's minds globally to the magic world below. 🐙
Pippa explains the message behind the movie best in an interview with @saveourseasfoundation
"We wanted to leave people walking away from their screens with a sense of awe and wonder, and motivation to build their own connection with nature in whatever way they choose"
She continues with her conservation efforts through @seachangeproject and no doubt will continue to enjoy and protect the wonders in the big blue for the rest of her life.
💙
(https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2019.00048)