I am not a scientist, but came across this image several times through Twitter and Facebook beside some caption along the lines of "Wow! All this life in just a drop of seawater!" And to be honest, I was pretty impressed.
However as zooplankton expert Miriam Goldstein corrects us, the picture is very misleading. This is a classic example of something going viral on the internet and us uneducated numpties sharing along without having any idea whether it is true or not. I find it kind of scary how we can simply take a fact for granted - just because it's on the internet.
Read the full post to get to the bottom of how this image became dubbed as "a single drop of seawater". Despite having VERY little interest in science, it's actually pretty cool!
This is NOT a “drop” of seawater. The ocean is not a thick zooplankton soup, except for in some rare and special circumstances. This is the result of towing a zooplankton net around to concentrate seawater enough to actually look at the zooplankton. Basically, this photo is a swimming-pool amount of ocean concentrated down into about a half-pint of goo.
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