[Applause] [Music] well good evening and welcome to the bir Arium at scripts oceanography I am nigela hilgarth I'm the executive director of the Birch Aquarium and this evening is the latest in the Jeffrey B Graham perspectives on ocean science lectures and it gives me great pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker Dr Russ Chapman most of you know that Russ is now the executive director of cmbc here at uh scripts oceanography but I want to tell you a little bit about his distinguished career as a [Music] botanist among other things he went to um Dartmouth College got his ba in uh 1968 and then he went to UC Davis got his Masters in 1970 in botany and also in 1973 he finished his PhD in not surprisingly pychology given tonight's talk and his research interests are in alil ALR structure and philogyny he's had a very distinguished career mainly at Louisiana State University he first of all went there as an assistant professor in 1973 and in fact he went through the ranks and was left there in 19 uh sorry 2005 as a full Professor but during that time as a professor of Botany he also began to do a lot of administrative jobs and he's one of those rare individuals that is a distinguished scientist and also a very good administrator he was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for from 1979 to 83 and Associate de of the College of basic Sciences Sciences in 19 83 to 84 and he was chair of the Department of plant biology from 1988 to 19 94 and the associate Vice Chancellor of the office of research and economic development from 94 to 96 and then after asent as interim director he became the executive director for the center for Coastal energy and environmental resources at lisiana State University and after that he n in 2001 he became the dean of the said School of the coastal environment so we were very very lucky to entice him here to come and be the executive director of the center for marine biodiversity and conservation at scrips oceanography before I ask him to start the lecture tonight I want to tell you just a little bit a few personal Snippets about Russ that will give you an idea of the diversity of his interests and background he loves to boogie board I gather uh he also has a deep interest in music and theater and in fact has even written his own one act play that I believe was been staged and also he um did a twoa Opera which um I is pretty exciting and I'm expecting him to burst into song sometime this evening just to give you an idea of the his intense interest in algae um I heard this evening from his wife Melanie that when he was in the ICU um he was actually found lecturing the nurses on algae so that gives you an interest an example of somebody who's had a clearly a lifelong and passionate interest in algae so now over to Russ to talk about the world's most important Plants algae thank you Nigella and I hope all of you can hear uh many of you know that good speakers tend to begin by saying how happy they are to be with you for this presentation and I would like to begin this evening by telling you how happy I am to be here with you I would like to do that but I can't and the problem is with Nigella and Nigella uh some of you may not realize this but some time ago I sent Nigella two or three pages of dos and don'ts for good presentations and I am standing here petrified because I'm afraid that Nigella will have those sheets of dos and don'ts and is going to be checking them off as I speak so Nigella please tell me you don't have those lists with you but now you reminded me I'm just oh I am now doomed ladies and gentlemen it is a pleasure to be with you this evening to talk about the algae and if I can do this correctly the algae the world's most important plants and the subtitle for this evening's presentation is that your life depends on them and uh I'm going to try and do in 40 or 45 minutes what I normally do over a 12-week period in teaching picology so please uh hold on to your seats here as we try and go through this the plan if all goes well I'm going to start very quickly talking about attitudes including perhaps your attitude then I'm going to go on to the big point of why the algae are the world's most important plants do you all see that plants is in quotation marks yes or no is that important right going on I'll introduce what the algae are and then talk about some of the big ones the seaweeds that many of you know and then comment to be fair about some of the small ones that are also extremely important then try and throw at you some more reasons the algae are more important than you may have thought and then God willing at the end we'll come to the last slide and that we'll all be delighted we've gotten to that point now the algae and attitude uh the English language is partly at fault here as most of you know we often refer to the algae as the sea weeds and if they're freshwater algae we often refer to them as Pond scum we've got an attitude problem already and some people even even refer to them as frog spittle this is bad attitude now these algae students or picology students back at LSU have the right attitude the mere fact they're taking a course in picology shows how smart they are and uh they've got a good healthy attitude and I'm going to teach you the fundamentals very very quickly are you ready here we go good attitude fol ology fos and logos Greek and Greek that is the correct term that is good algology Latin and Greek a bad mixture technically algology should be the study of pain or painful study so that's not the right term even though we have journals of algology and I'm on one of the editorial Boards of such a journal but you know better than those journals picology is the right word now here's the hardest part one alga two or more alga does everybody understand alga the singular and Latin algae the plural so let's see if we can do this one two or more this is fantastic there are famous scientists around the world who haven't gotten that straight yet and you've got it done immediately all right now the big picture why algae are so important what is this what is this nickname The Blue Planet why is it called the Blue Planet water water when you have lots of water what do you have lots of algae and if you have lots of algae what do you have lots of oxygen so half or more of the oxygen we're breathing comes from the algae if you don't agree with me that the algae are the world's most important plants please hold your breath for the next 12 hours and we will discuss this issue later so the algae are giving you the air you breathe right now during this lecture For Better or For Worse but we can go back in time we can go back about 3.5 billion years ago when the Blu green algae or cyanobacteria arose and these microscopic algae had pigments and started doing photosynthesis and they produced oxygen so here's the start of our life story in a sense what happened to the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere did they go up or not yes or no don't be frightened the camera's not on you did the oxygen levels go up with all those millions of blue greine algae producing oxygen yes or no no it was a trick question as you should have suspected I am told by colleagues who know these things that for millions of years the oxygen that was being produced did go into the atmosphere but it was quickly used up to oxidize iron ores and other minerals that could be oxidized and so the oxygen did not really accumulate for a while for a long while actually it wasn't until 2.2 billion years ago that the oxygen levels started to really increase and eukariotic Life as we know it had a a beginning because oxygen was now in the atmosphere so think about that those little green blue green algae are producing oxygen and for over a billion years it's not doing much did they give up no they kept photosynthesizing until they changed the atmosphere an evolution of higher forms could begin you see the little red circle yes notice how the artist has shown some creatures crawling out of the water and onto land was that important of course because we wouldn't be here if we didn't have terrestrial life but notice how in this artist rendition which is not entirely accurate that the Earth is already vegetated now have you thought about this the animals come out of the water to eat things on land there has to be stuff on land for them to eat where did that come from the algae this the Earth before the algae got out of the water the Earth after the algae got out of the water the green algae literally conquered the land and gave rise to all of the land Flora we enjoy today that allowed terrestrial animals like us to For Better or Worse evolve and be here so without the algae no land plants without the land plants no animals no people For Better or For Worse now this may look like an ocean uh strangely but notice how it's labeled it is a big lake is that important yes or no yes I wouldn't have put that little label there if it weren't important because it's an ocean picture but it's supposed to be a lake and the reason is that's where this historic event took place 475 million years ago According to some people the green algae came out of the fresh water and conquered the land and this cartoon by my colleague Jim Graham actually depicts one of the algae that might be the closest relative to the land plants today how many of you have gone to sleep thinking about this important moment in history and time when the green algae conquered the land I bet not one of you has gone to sleep thinking about this and yet none of you would be here if it hadn't been for that historic moment in the evolution of the land Flora as indicated in the little footnote there my colleagues in the world of science don't all agree about exactly when this occurred whether it was 475 or 700 million years ago but when it happened it was important now I'm not speaking tonight about any of my ultr structure or molecular evolutionary research but I will tell you that my special interest is the evolution of green algae and land plants so there's one slide is the only homage to my own research program but you can see very important feature here first all of the land plants are part of this big group called in this case the verid plantey or the green plants but most of the things in this big group are the green algae the freshwater kopice is the group that is known to have given rise to the land plants they in turn are related to this little unicell of freshwater alga and basically as we'll see in this next slide this story of evolution gives us the land floor including massive trees all coming from this little tiny freshwater alga fascinating area worth a whole talk in itself now for those of you who are the thinking types why was it the freshwater green algae that gave rise to all the land plants and not the Marine green algae think about that okay so the algae gave rise to the land plants with the land plants we could have land animals these are the plants and animals you know and love and also love to eat so basically whether you're a vegetarian or not all of the food you eat is here because green algae conquered the land all of humankind is here because of that historic event that nobody goes to sleep thinking about now we're going to talk about what the algae are are you ready I'm going to keep this simple all right we've got red algae we've got brown algae and green algae and golden algae and I've already mentioned blue green algae and so it's pretty simple there are different kinds of algae and they are colorful it turns out as many of you would realize these are based on the actual photosynthetic and accessory pigments the chemical pigments that are in these algae and it turns out that those biochemical factors like many others do allow us to group all of these algae into major groups so what is a definition for algae well they are photo autot tropes or photosynthesizing organisms but we also include their colorless relatives because there are some that have lost their pigments and their photosynthesis the algae are all relatively morphologically simple and their sexual structures and sex lives are by our standards pretty simple red green blue green yellow gold Etc is pretty simplistic so for the more aidite we have the appropriate scientific terms the reds are the rodopa greens are the chlorop ETC and I've added some additional groups so there are many interesting groups of algae with interesting names now is everybody prepared this next slide may be hard on you are you ready you can handle this yes okay all right I'll leave this on for a little bit for those who are taking notes so you can get it all down this is a relatively new tree of life based on current molecular evidence from my colleague Sandy bald off uh there are many different versions of these kinds of trees they are being refined as molecular data comes in to help us better understand the story but now I'm going to show you the algae are all over the place first the seaweeds marked by the asterisk the Browns the greens and the Reds now the other groups of algae some of which I've already shown you by name on the screen so all over this tree of life there are these things called algae the term for this is polyphilic that is to say the algae are not a single coherent natural group but rather represent all kinds of different organisms scattered about this tree of life so polyphilic and I haven't even mentioned the cyanobacteria because those are procaryotes and are not even shown on this tree which is just the eukaryotic or nucleus contain containing forms of life so the algae are scattered all over the Tree of Life the algae are scattered all over the face of the Earth they are not really everywhere but more or less most of you are quite aware that algae tend to live in the water so that means they are in oceans and lakes and rivers and streams some of you ski enthusiasts know very well that the algae live in the snow and ice and uh some of you may be aware that they can be in the air they're also in the ground and rocks and on Turtle backs they grow on mosquito larv an Tenny think about the scientists who figure that out why they were looking at mosquito larv antenna to find these algae I don't know in Hot Springs on ducks feet that was another interesting paper the sulfur belly whale why do you think the belly is yellow it's because of algae growing on the belly diatoms that give the color polar bears often turn green in zoos because of algae the tropical sloths in the green foliage probably are saved from predation because they turn green because green algae are growing on them even in little protozoans there are lots of algae and I'm not going to go into this so it's too close to dinner but in humans there are living algae in some cases all right so the algae more or less can occur almost anywhere and now we'll get into some of the representatives the plants are the green things which I've already shown you and so we'll start with the green seaweeds or green algae there are a few very few characters I'm going to share with you because of the time limitations so thank you're lucky stars you don't get the full lecture but some characteristics that might be of interest as I mentioned already these are really plants so if people say are algae plants the correct answer is yes some algae are indeed plants plants there may be around 8,000 species different species of green algae these numbers are very fluid and you can see different numbers in different places so don't take them too seriously but 90% of the green algae tend to be fresh water which is interesting and that's where our land plants came from and very quickly I'll just mention that the green algae range from Tiny unicells that you can only see with a microscope to fairly large algae not giant like Kelps but large now just a few quick examples I've only chosen two or three the mermaid's cup acetabularia isn't that beautiful name acetabularia these little goblet likee algae they are macroscopic they're a couple of millimeters so you can see them with a naked eye and handle them each of these goblets is a single cell a large large single cell if that doesn't impress you this is an adult human hand this is the green alga alonia and that is a single cell okay and if that doesn't impress you I'm in trouble because that is a pretty big cell and these particular green algae have been very useful for various kinds of research approaches cell physiology and cell biology now I want to briefly talk about the Weeds on the east coast codium is one and in the Mediterranean Cera is the Bane and many of you have heard or read about this scourge of the Mediterranean it is a beautiful alga trust me they look like feathers and these can be maybe a foot tall the whole plant can be maybe a few meters long everything you see is a single cell and this gorgeous feather-like alga can grow like a weed which is what it's doing and spread throughout the Mediterranean for those of you who have not heard the interesting story about this alga it was released by accident from the aquarium in Monaco back in 1984 a marine biologist noticed the small population and sounded the alarm did people listen to him yes or no no and as you can see the alga spread and spread further and I believe there is no hope of actually eradicating it or controlling it in the Mediterranean and Heaven only knows how long it will take to for natural systems to perhaps bring this alga under control this is the Mediterranean far from home lest you think some of these things are not important this is a little headline so to speak from July 2006 many of you may be more familiar with the story than I am cuzz I'm relatively new here but in fact we had kerpa it was introduced somehow perhaps from a a local home aquarium and I believe millions of dollars were spent to eradicate it and the eradication was a pretty wicked process in terms of releasing Cyanide and other things to kill the alga but apparently California avoided the problem that the Mediterranean suffered okay now we're going to run to the second group of bigger algae seaweeds and that is the red algae and I'm quickly going to show you that the red algae according to the latest molecular data belong very close to all the green things so most scientists would now say that the red algae which are very beautiful uh are actually plants as well so we have two groups of algae that are really plants the rest are not hence the quot ation marks around plants now looking at the characteristics of the red algae they are plants maybe 6 to 8,000 species and in this case 90% are Marine a flip sort of from what we saw with the green algae some of these red algae are actually calcified and are important components in coral reefs Nancy Nolton is not here so I can perhaps get away with saying this red algae experts don't even use the term coral reef because that ignores how important the coral and red algae can be they refer to them as biological reefs and that way the full credit to the coral analogy is least possible many of you are familiar with augur and the kagenin these are commercial polysaccharide Products that come from the red algae and have been used in an industrial economic sense for at least 2 or 300 years many of you are more familiar with pora this is what it looks like on a herbarium sheet and that is lava or the coating around your sushi so when you are eating sushi you are eating algae and if you like sushi remember that if you don't like sushi forget it Pharmaceuticals which I'll talk about again in a second are an important topic relative to the algae and fed algae have been used in experimental processes for many years looking for antivirus and anti-cancer compounds and lastly I'm just going to mention porium porium is a unicell shown in this transmission electron microscope picture and because it was a single cell red alga it was used in a lot of fundamental research comparing for example photosynthesis in red algae with photosynthesis in green plants also I worked on that organism for my PhD finishing the seaweeds we're going to jump over here to the brown algae these are the Macho algae and that is because they generally are very big now it's interesting on that tree of life it's quite clear they are not closely related to the plants so they are not plants in a strict sense however it is fascinating the giant Kelps have evolved Anatomy that is in a sense identical to that in land plants including trees so they're very plant-like even if they're not plants only 2,20 species and almost all of them are Marine anybody who finds freshwater brown algae is almost instantly famous because they're so rare there are some small brown algae including the rare freshwater one but most of them are large macroscopic things you see the seaweeds along the shore and of course the giant Kelps allgenic acid is the compound in the walls of many of the Kelps including macroy that has been the basis of industrial use for a long long time the whole industry was a nice story for San Diego and as soon as I moved here Kelco I believe closed down its kelp processing operations and has gone to Scotland but never less the whole story of the Ecology of the kelp beds and the industry is a fascinating topic a whole separate lecture this is just a Rogues Gallery because many of you are familiar with these Brown seaweeds along the shores various species of fucus are found almost everywhere these little receptacles filled with a jelly-like substance some children like to squeeze and pop them at least on the East Coast some people like to eat them almost like salty jelly beans for those of you who either thing I will let you know that these are basically the sexual reproductive structure holding parts of the plant so you are eating all the sex organs of the alga so to speak but if that doesn't bother you then fine pelia most people on the west coast are clearly familiar with at least seeing this a magnificent organism the Ecology of which is fascinating given the habitat in which it grows finally macroy the kelp forest alga no need to say much there SAR the alga that myth and stories is based are based on occurring in masses in the open ocean as you see in the the map above and the picture below so these are some of the sort of Macho brown algae and now we're going to jump as we wind down to the small things I'm going to start with the blue green algae they are cyanobacteria or procario they do not have a nucleus they are generally small although some of them make big colon you can pick up in your bare hands many of you may have heard of the term stromatolite these are the structures formed by the blue green algae and in certain environments in Mexico and in Australia today they still exist and are being formed some of the stratales date back to 3.5 billion years ago part of the proof we have that those blue greens were there making oxygen I have labeled this specialized cell the heterocyst is this important oh yes oh yes because it's labeled and has got a red arrow it's got to be important now why anybody it is the S of right nitrogen fixation and is that important yes it is very important some people have said that next to photosynthesis and respiration nitrogen fixation is the third most important sort of biochemical process on the face of the planet so these specialized little cells are specialized for nitrogen fixation fascinating story in terms of the ultr structure and biochemistry if you don't think this is important check with me later on how many tens of millions of dollars Dow Chemical and others have spent trying to unlock the mysteries of biological nitrogen fixation because it's such an important process now continuing with our theme of little things we're down to the phytol Plankton the phytoplankton are the pasturage of the Seas and you know I've already alluded to the fact that the green algae gave rise to the land plants and the land plants are what land animals eat so whether you're a vegetarian or not everything you eat comes from ultimately the algae in a sense in the oceans for those of you who like seafood please remember that it is the algae that are the pasturage of the sea it is the algae that are the photosynthesizers that are producing the initial food that supports all of life in the oceans so if you like fish the ones that we are allowed to eat now uh any form of seafood then the algae of the starting point so there are three major groups of phytoplankton that are the bulk of this page of the sea the dinoflagellates the datom and the cocko litho forits so we will quickly go through all of these showing you the tree of life again to show you that these groups are not closely related they are spread out on that tree of life but they are unified in terms of those features being photosynthetic being relatively simple and having relatively simple reproduction now the dof flatulates or PIRA beautiful classical name for them most of you if you know about them know about them because of the red Tides or the H ABS that is harmful algo blooms seran beautiful dinoflagellate but the next picture shows you a bloom of noct Taluca this is a little boat with a human being normal sized human being I believe and so it gives you a feeling for the extent of this Bloom of the dagul noctiluca well many of you are familiar with paralytic shellfish poisoning diuretic shellfish poisoning neurotoxic shellfish poisoning Etc and the dinoflagellates are involved with most of those harmful conditions and the toxins associated with them and it is true that there seem to be more harmful algo blooms around the world than there have been in the past and where they do occur they very often are more extensive than they had been before now some of you may think that this is an example of why algae are bad but of course that is not really the case the algae are not bad they're there they're doing their thing but in many cases the reason they bloom in such dangerous quantities is because the nutrient levels have been increased Way Beyond nor normal and who do you think did that people got that so remember algae good people bad if you stick with that Mantra most of the time you'll be right the reason some of these harmful algo blooms are occurring in different locations is because the dinoflagellates have been transported from one part of the world to another where they shouldn't be and they take off and BL who do you think transported them people in ballast water for example and so of course these algae in a new fertile environment Go Wild and so again the algae are really not the problem it is the people who are the problem if you don't believe me eliminate all the people and I can assure you there'll be no more bad headlines about all these environmental problems now the datom the datom are worth several lectures just by them El for one reason they're very abundant and perhaps one of the most important groups of phytoplankton in terms of production but they live in glass houses and think about that they make their own glass houses these diagrams show you different views and illustrate that the walls or frustules or epitheca and hypotheca are built more or less like a petri plate this presents some problems in terms of your cyop living inside a glass house now there's not time to go into a lot of interesting stuff about datom however some of you know that in the Victorian days people used to make datam pictures moving the little datom around and gluing them down and so forth you see before you a contemporary datom art piece by klous Kemp in the United Kingdom these are all datom that he has maneuvered into position and fixed in position to create beautiful things the colors you see are from the refraction basically those diatoms are colorless glass but it's the ornamentation that reflects reflects the light refracts the light to give you the various colors that you're seeing and we just have I think two more this is my favorite I think as a botanist uh those are all diatoms for those of you who are not Botanical here's one that's kind of cute and I have to tell you he has done the scripts logo in datom I didn't get that in time to show you tonight and I wasn't certain whether I wanted to show you an unacceptable logo tonight because we want to be careful about logos but he has done the scripts logo now the diam art is straying a little bit because that really doesn't underscore the importance although the aesthetic importance I guess can be mentioned so I just wanted to mention that some of my colleagues here at scripts have an interest in datom that is more scientific and as you see from this slide Dr Mark hilderbrand and many colleagues actually around the world are studying diatoms because of their potential in terms of micro or Nano devices and if you think about that these diatoms have these beautiful glass structures which you just saw in those beautiful pictures each of these is different each of these is Faithfully reproduced by that particular species tremendous detail very microscopic how do the cells do it and so there's a lot of work going on to try and either learn how they do it or use them to create other structures similarly Brian palik in hubs Hall here at scripts is one of those scientists who's also interested in basic biology and in this case using datom as well as cyanobacteria to look at the photosynthetic processes and the responses of these organisms to their environment we're going to wind down here with the coolth forids that's the hard one to pronounce towards the end of the evening here coolth forids or haptophytes and these are unbelievable organisms this is a tiny one over here that's a very good picture with a very good microscope light microscope so it's a very tiny cell this drawing is easier to see and the little structures those are the cocko liths little calcium carbonate circular Stone like scales on the surface of the cell so the cells are called cocko litho forids the things that carry coccoliths I did a lot of electron microscopy so I want to show you these little cockus enlarged in the scanning electron microscope still very tiny but look how beautiful look how ornate all of these cockal lists cover the surface of the cell but remember this cell is invisible to the naked eye just visible with a light microscope these generally are just barely visible in a very fine microscope so are cockal liths big yes or no no are they small are they very small are they really really tiny is that important and this is why those of you who've seen the White Cliffs of Dover are those Cliffs small no no those are Big White Cliffs and what are they made of CH chalk and what is the chalk calcium carbonate cool liths from the coith forids do you know how many cool litho Fords it takes to make the white P of do all right do understand I mean this is totally unbelievable that for millions and millions of years the productivity was so great in the oceans that the accumulation of these tiny calcium carbonate particles could amass like that now just to be sure the coverage is complete there's a group of tiny Plankton called the Pico or Pico Plankton these Plankton are so small that scientists couldn't find them and didn't know they existed however they're actually one of the most important components in terms of overall production in the ocean you may be wondering if they're so small we don't know they exist how do we know they exist now and that's a separate story but it helps emphasize lots of these tiny phytoplancton organisms in the oceans for billions of years photosynthesizing producing various things you leave them doing their thing for billions of years and what do you get well you get the white cist of over I showed you you what else do you get I'll give you a hint gas and oil ladies and gentlemen I come from Louisiana and we know all about this and uh even after Katrina the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico we have over 4,000 gas and oil plant platforms out there these deposits are almost all based from alal deposits going back to the Cretaceous so because of the algae you have gas and oil as a relatively cheap except recently source of energy for human progress and so here in California you've got progress now there are some of you who care for the environment might think that there are some problems with gas and oil and pollution and cars and so forth may I remind you that the algae provided the gas and oil it was not the algae that led to this kind of use of that resource so once again the algae are good the people are bad now many of you are much more practical than an ivory Tower scientist and so you're think thinking in terms of patents and Industry and money and so forth and well algae people like to think that way occasionally too this is a recent article uh July 2006 where a Spanish firm claims it can make oil from the Plankton I just gave you a brief piece of that article to raise the issue so basically they're saying we can grow the algae the algae goes to gas usable gas or biofuel and then we have more progress now some of you are kind of jaded and the first thing you might say is you know this article comes from Spain and that's a foreign country far away and uh I don't believe it well I have to tell you I'm a little skeptical about this particular claim but I want to bring home some reality here this is an aerial view of general atomic San Diego facility you all see that guess what they came to scripts to talk to Bill gerwick and me and maybe some others about algae as a source of biofuel so it's not just in Spain around the world this is actually a viable idea I believe Ralph Luen even proposed something along these lines 15 years ago the first alga that I collected from a cow pond in New Hampshire in the 1960s Barrio cockus brownie e is poetic name the oils that that green alga makes can be fed into a Refinery directly to make fuel so it's not quite so far-fetched finally the last phase here um most of you are familiar with the very exciting things going on at scrips in terms of the center for marine biotechnology and bi medicine bill fenol has helped to make scripts the leading site in the world for this kind of important and Innovative research many of you like my wife Melanie and I had the pleasure last month to hear my colleague Bill gerwick give a fascinating lecture specifically on Pon scum blue green algae as a source of many interesting biochemical compounds potentially medically useful and sources of biochemical Pathways that are important for us and for our future so I haven't covered everything but I think time is running out and I'm going to give you the big picture once again uh the Big Bang was maybe 14 to 16 million billion years ago they've been pushing it back to 16 billion uh it took a while but somewhere in there around 3.5 billion years ago I started my story with the blue green algae so basically what I've tried to tell you tonight and I don't know how easy you are to convince but I pointed out the algae are a source of more than half the oxygen we're breathing but they were the source of the oxygen that changed the evolutionary history of the planet I've told you that the pasturage of the sea are algae and they are the source basically of all Seafood that we consume and abuse in terms of overc consuming in many parts of the world now I've also pointed out that the land plants are the descendants of the green algae which means that all of the land food the steak and broccoli and the potatoes are here because of the algae so the algae have given you the oxygen you breathe and all the food you eat but they've also given you the oil and gas that keeps your cars going and our Industries going Etc For Better or For Worse and now there's even a hint that the Aly might produce a new source of gas and oil for future as our supply of the original old gas and oil are depleted and finally there is no question that the algae are among those marine organisms that are providing new pharmaceutical compounds that are extremely important especially as we see disease organisms becoming in a sense immune to the antibiotics that we currently have so given all of that I would hope that you agree that the algae are the world's most important plants and you don't have to jump up and scream I believe although I was going to try and get some of my friends to do that but with that this is indeed the last slide and thank you very much the question is why was the kalera in the lagoon a problem that required a million more than a million dollars worth of eradication right basically and the answer is that it can grow like a weed and what it will do is take over and first of all eliminate other plants and animals that are native to that area it also then becomes an actual physical nuisance for swimming and Recreation and so that's in a sense the main reason and the other thing is that as they learned in the Mediterranean even if in that Lagoon it would not be an unbearable problem if it had not been eradicated it would soon have spread further and further to other areas cover it and uh by the way I mentioned that those beautiful feather like algal plants the cerpas are single cells which is I mean that's almost mindboggling to think about that so let's say one of you is an eager beaver and now we get some Kera in the children's pool to create even more more Havoc there and you go trying to at least eliminate that problem you go and you tear up that Cera okay and rip it out now you think you are doing a good job but what happens is you break those beautiful feathers and some of that cytoplasm oozes out and does it just say I'm defeated I'm dead no that copl balls up reforms and grows into a whole new plant so you rip out one 3-ft piece of colera and you get 24 little Globs of protoplasm in the water and next month they're going to be 24 big feathery plants again so it's it's a fascinating organism the question is the acidification of the ocean uh has been mentioned and then I believe the way this question was worded was could that could the algae in a sense have a beneficial effect in terms of this problem yes isn't it so that the algae take the carbon and make it into so he the comment with the question is that the algae are pulling carbon dioxide out of the water so they could they be a part of helping the situation as we see acidification well that's interesting perspective and my first answer would be no uh yes they are pulling the carbon dioxide out they're doing that all the time but the acidification of the water will adversely affect those algae like the cool lithoids and like the Coral in red algae that right now are creating these hard substances at a lower pH and there's a question of how they will survive as the pH actually Rises and the algae are not preventing that rise even though they are pulling CO2 out the question was uh I guess do I have any rough estimate of the volume of algae it would take to generate uh a certain amount of fuel in other words to replace say the US consumption of gas and oil and the answer is no I certainly don't however that is one of the Practical questions or problems in terms of all of these potential commercial plans to use algae as a source of biofuels and the other thing of course is that you have to have sunlight for the photosynthesis to begin with and so you're limited to an outdoor situation if you don't want to spend money on electricity so now you're Outdoors you're trying to grow algae in great quantities although I can't give you the estimate of what the volume would be but they're growing Outdoors where there are other things in the air and so how do you grow a pure culture of an oil producing alga if you're growing it in Mammoth tanks out of doors so there are a lot of practical questions not the least of which is the volume the total volume the question is do they know what the byproducts would be from the combustion of these potential alal fuels as compared to say the current combustion of regular uh gas or diesel and my answer was at least for the the botre caucus example that I gave my understanding is that it would be a very analogous situation to regular gasoline I mean it would be fed into the same refineries and the the product would be similar enough to gasoline there would not be a significant difference one way or the other however I do not know what these current articles like the one I showed from Spain or what the people at General atomics are working on I do not know exactly what their target fuel is so I can't say about that the question was as actually the caltha Fords why did they build the White Cliffs of Dover well you know if they were people I'd say it's cuz they had some relatives who were going to sell postcards the White Cliffs of do in the background but basically the coith of forids were just blooming in the oceans and then when the individual cells died those cockal liths are basically permanent and they just sank and so they were just sinking uh for millions or billions of years the algae didn't know that they were going to create such a a Scenic uh Coast for England uh they were just happy to be in the oceans doing their thing and so it was just the passive accumulation forming these massive layers which then concreted with time and pressure and then geological forces pushed them up and so then they but they were at the bottom of the sea originally and my mention that uh global warming is certainly a current topic and I didn't get into that at all however I believe this is reasonably accurate uh some of these Blooms of the calitho fors turn the ocean basically white pale gray and it is believed that actually that helps reflect sunlight and that these blooms are part of the whole picture of the heat balance of the planet so that they are doing good and there are other ways in which the algae are also supposed to be helping to mitigate against global warming well I think with my colleague bill gerwick here and I can defer to him the question is in terms of the Pharmaceuticals uh are things advancing or not and the answer is that I think Bill gerwick and perhaps I would say we're not sure they're advancing as fast as we would like in terms of the tremendous potential but that has to do with getting the agencies and the funding sources to provide the further development of these important compounds and so I think that yes it's advancing we do have more and exciting new compounds that have potential but they're not being taken into potential medicines as fast as they could or should be the question is that locally offshore some people swimming can encounter uh White almost soapy like substance that is said to be an alal byproduct and the question is do I know anything about that well the answer is no in terms of here and what you you're seeing however yes in terms of uh there are algae that do that and produce uh an almost scummy like white substance that very often will wash up on beaches but I have to admit I'm not familiar with that out here so I would be interested to to know exactly what it is here thank you very very much [Music] [Music]