IT SEEMS that plankton can travel against prevailing ocean currents – with a little help from eddies.
You might expect plankton to drift along with ocean currents. But when Meric Srokosz and colleagues from the Southampton Oceanography Centre in the UK analysed satellite images of the Indian Ocean around Madagascar, they saw plankton – which show up as streaks of green in the blue water – spreading east at top speeds of nearly 10 kilometres per day. Yet the ocean currents there are driven west by the Earth’s rotation.
Earlier models had predicted that eddies in the ocean may drive plankton against the…
