Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, part of the NPR network, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

You don't know what's true or not, because you don't know if AI was involved in it.

And I think we will see it to a streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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If you had to pick a favorite ocean critter, what would it be?

Whale, dolphin, penguin, coral?

One of my new favorites after talking with biologist Martina Messione is phytoplankton.

They're the base of the food web in most of the ocean areas, and like our Earth is like 70% ocean.

So everything that happens in the ocean relies on phytoplankton eventually.

Plankton comes from the Greek word for drifter and refers to anything that can't swim against the current,

which makes jellyfish plankton.

And the plankton we're talking about today, phytoplankton, can make their own food from sunlight through photosynthesis.

Because of this, the whole ocean needs them. And so do humans. There are some estimations that say

like 50% of the oxygen that is on the atmospheres come from the ocean and specifically from

the phytoplankton. Martina the phytoplankton.

Martina studies phytoplankton that live in Antarctic polar fjords,

these narrow ocean inlets that have been carved out by glaciers.

Because of the crystal clear water and the abundance of nutrients like nitrates, phosphates, and sulfur,

there are a lot of phytoplankton in and

near the surface of these waters. So many that in the summer, there are enough of them to feed

the millions of tons of krill that then feed all the whales that migrate to Antarctica.

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