Episode 216 - Plankton

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Education, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2025

⏱️ 130 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just about every body of water on Earth, from oceans to puddles, is home to an ecosystem of tiny drifting organisms. This episode, we discuss what sorts of organisms we might expect to find in a swarm of plankton, we’ll explore how plankton is so fundamental to biological and geological systems on Earth, and we’ll take some time to lay out some of the many ways that ancient plankton are a crucial part of the fossil record. In the news: climbing reptiles, croc extinctions, Ashfall rhinos, and ankylosaur tracks. Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:05:40 Main discussion, Part 1: 00:35:15 Main discussion, Part 2: 01:23:00 Patron question: 02:00:30 Check out our website for this episode’s blog post and more: http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Listen to Will talk speculative evolution on the Nerd Trek Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/episode/2NzdG8TMfwGLzpP8sKXHQA And listen to David talk de-extinction on the House of Podhttps://open.spotify.com/show/3z6EgP0BzaHQoXzCtxQ32t Support links:ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/ Got a topic you want to hear about? Submit your episode request here: https://commondescentpodcast.com/request-a-topic/ Lots more ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, David. Oh, hello, Will. And hello, listeners. Welcome to episode 216 of the Common Descent
0:27.2	Podcast, where we talk about all manners of Earth history and paleontology. And today we're talking
0:33.2	about plankton, which is a very fun topic that is a very broad.
0:37.8	Like, it seems like one top, one concept, but it covers a very wide aspect of living organisms.
0:46.5	Yeah.
0:46.9	Plankton is a big, plankton, it often mentioned and rarely discussed in detail, a really
0:53.5	literally fundamental part of Earth ecology.
0:57.9	Absolutely.
0:59.1	We'll be diving in, since it's in the ocean, we have to.
1:02.9	And talking about what plankton is, what are some of the members of the plankton group?
1:09.7	What's in there?
1:10.6	Yes, that soup, who's making it up?
1:13.6	We're not going to be able to go into like every taxa because there's so many, but we'll
1:18.2	be going over the different lifestyles that are found among the planktonic organisms and
1:24.7	discuss some of the ways we categorize them.
1:27.4	We'll talk about how the assemblage has changed throughout Earth's history
1:32.9	and how some of them might have evolved, as well as their extreme importance to paleontological studies.
1:40.7	Yeah, big deal, plankton.
1:42.3	Yes, they get used a lot. So we'll get to actually learn
1:46.4	about these very important research critters. Yeah, shout out to all of our marine
1:52.5	invertebrate micropalientologists out there. Yes, we're saying finally. Two hundred episodes.
	...

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