Plankton Planet: A frugal, cooperative measure of aquatic life at the planetary scale

Colomban de Vargas (1, 2) , Noan Le Bescot (2, 1) , Thibaut Pollina (3, 4) , Nicolas Henry (1, 2) , Sarah Romac (5, 2, 1) , Sébastien Colin (6, 1) , Nils Haëntjens (7, 1) , Margaux Carmichael (1) , Calixte Berger (1) , David Le Guen (1) , Johan Decelle (8) , Frédéric Mahé (9) , Julie Poulain (10, 1) , Emmanuel Malpot (11) , Carole Beaumont (12) , Michel Hardy (13) , Damien Guiffant (1) , Ian Probert (5, 2, 1) , David Gruber (14) , Andrew Allen (15, 16) , Gabriel Gorsky (17, 1) , Michael Follows (18) , Xavier Pochon (19, 20) , Romain Troublé (1, 21) , B. Cael (22, 1) , Fabien Lombard (17, 1, 23) , Emmanuel Boss (7, 1) , Manu Prakash (1, 4)

1 SBR - Station biologique de Roscoff = Roscoff Marine Station
2 ECOMAP - ECOlogy of MArine Plankton
3 Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University
4 Stanford University
5 ADMM - Adaptation et diversité en milieu marin
6 Max-Planck-Institut fur Biologie = Max Planck Institute for Biology [Tübingen]
7 University of Maine
8 Photosymbiose
9 UMR PHIM - Plant Health Institute of Montpellier
10 JACOB - Institut de Biologie François JACOB
11 Moana New Zealand, Cawthron Aquaculture Park
12 On board ‘Folligou’
13 On board 'Taravana'
14 Baruch College [CUNY]
15 JCVI - J. Craig Venter Institute [La Jolla, USA]
16 SIO - UC San Diego - Scripps Institution of Oceanography
17 LOV - Laboratoire d'océanographie de Villefranche
18 MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
19 University of Auckland [Auckland]
20 Cawthron Institute
21 Fondation Tara Ocean
22 NOC - National Oceanography Centre [Southampton]
23 IUF - Institut universitaire de France

In every liter of seawater there are between 10 and 100 billion life forms, mostly invisible, called marine plankton or marine microbiome, which form the largest and most dynamic ecosystem on our planet, at the heart of global ecological and economic processes. While physical and chemical parameters of planktonic ecosystems are fairly well measured and modeled at the planetary scale, biological data are still scarce due to the extreme cost and relative inflexibility of the classical vessels and instruments used to explore marine biodiversity. Here we introduce ‘Plankton Planet’, an initiative whose goal is to engage the curiosity and creativity of researchers, makers, and mariners to ( i ) co-develop a new generation of cost-effective (frugal) universal scientific instrumentation to measure the genetic and morphological diversity of marine microbiomes in context, ( ii ) organize their systematic deployment through coastal or open ocean communities of sea-users/farers, to generate uniform plankton data across global and long-term spatio-temporal scales, and ( iii ) setup tools to flow the data without embargo into public and explorable databases. As proof-of-concept, we show how 20 crews of sailors were able to sample plankton biomass from the world surface ocean in a single year, generating the first seatizen-based, planetary dataset of marine plankton biodiversity based on DNA barcodes. The quality of this dataset is comparable to that generated by Tara Oceans and is not biased by the multiplication of samplers. The data unveil significant genetic novelty and can be used to explore the taxonomic and ecological diversity of plankton at both regional and global scales. This pilot project paves the way for construction of a miniaturized, modular, evolvable, affordable and open-source citizen field-platform that will allow systematic assessment of the eco/morpho/genetic variation of aquatic ecosystems and microbiomes across the dimensions of the Earth system.

Domaines: Ecosystèmes; Bio-Informatique, Biologie Systémique [q-bio.QM]; Systématique, phylogénie et taxonomie

Colomban de Vargas, Noan Le Bescot, Thibaut Pollina, Nicolas Henry, Sarah Romac, et al.. Plankton Planet: A frugal, cooperative measure of aquatic life at the planetary scale. Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022, 9, pp.936972. ⟨10.3389/fmars.2022.936972⟩. ⟨hal-03788523⟩