Sea Food

The seas of the world are inhabited by innumerable billions of tiny, drifting organisms called plankton. Some of this is animal life, but the vegetable plankton, largely one-celled diatoms or algae, is the basic food of the ocean; for all marine animals either eat the vegetable plankton or devour other animals which in turn are directly or indirectly dependent on it.

Vegetable plankton use sunlight and carbonic acid dissolved in the sea to produce carbohydrates. By measuring the amount of carbonic acid which thus disappears from a unit volume of water, marine biologists some time ago estimated the annual plankton crop at ten tons per acre of ocean surface. Recently scientists of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif., set out to check this figure, last week reported a yearly crop of five pounds per square meter of ocean surface, which agrees closely with ten tons per acre. The Scripps Institution scientists pointed out that this figure compares favorably with the yield per acre of food plants on land.

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