It is marvelous how nature can be just so surprising. Look at this little trumpet ball. Chet Baker would have loved it.It is the tiny "Disco-sphaera tubifera", a miniature type of algae, whith a very appropriate, and good sounding name. Try saying it out loud...
They are miniature in size only, being not smaller than a half split hair. However thay are gigantinc in numbers, living in great masses, throughout the our vast Earth's Oceans. One liter can contain millions of them. You can't really see them with the naked eye. But we all who go to sea, have seen tons of them already.
The family of the "Coccolithophorides", to whom the little "Disco-sphaera tubifera" belongs, form the very basis of the Oceanic food chain. They are also one of the main captors of CO2 from our atmosphere, and therefore an important participator in the creation of our climate. They lock the carbon into their very structure. And when they die, their carcasses fall onto the sea sediment, to form enormous submersed mountain ridges.
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