[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, the podcast. And today we're going to talk about global warfare, a vast battle across the planet on a scale that is really hard to believe, involving trillions of deaths, and yet we really need this war because without it I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be here, Jad wouldn't be here—and you may have noticed he isn't here, and it's not because of a war, it's because he had a baby. But before Jad went on paternity leave, we sat down with Ari Daniel Shapiro.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: And he told us this story.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Here it comes.

WILLIE WILSON: All right. Yeah, so here we are at the Center for the Culture of Marine Phytoplankton.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: This is Willie.

WILLIE WILSON: And I always say ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Willie Wilson.

JAD: Willie Wilson is his name?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

JAD: That's tough.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Just like his grandfather, actually.

WILLIE WILSON: Yeah, my dad's Willie Wilson, there's a long line of William Wilsons.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And your son?

WILLIE WILSON: My son is Angus. But he's Angus William Wilson, so ... [laughs]

JAD: Love that guy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Willie works at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine.

JAD: Okay.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he studies these tiny, plant-like creatures that live in the sea called phytoplankton.

WILLIE WILSON: Right, so put your ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He keeps them in a fridge in these little test tubes, half full of kind of greenish water.

WILLIE WILSON: Let's have a look at this.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He pulled one out and showed it to me. And it doesn't really look like there's that much going on in there.

WILLIE WILSON: But right at the bottom you can see what looks like ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Like a white ...

WILLIE WILSON: Sort of goo ...

JAD: What is it?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It's the carnage of war.

JAD: Oh.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: In that test tube that Willie is holding are millions of tiny, single-celled plants called coccolithophores.

JAD: Coccolithophores ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, and there are lots of them in the sea.

WILLIE WILSON: There's probably about 100,000 of these coccolithophores in a teaspoon of sea water.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Tell me about the coccolitho— like what do they look like?

WILLIE WILSON: They're basically like tiny, little, translucent balls—you know like a slight tinge of green. But the key thing is ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: The outside of that ball, it has these white plates.

WILLIE WILSON: Tiny, circular shields of chalk.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because the coccolithophores are fighting for their lives.

JAD: Fighting with whom? Each other?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Viruses. These viruses that are shaped like diamonds. So here's what happens. Imagine you're a coccolithophore ...

ROBERT: Okay.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Floating in the ocean. And along comes this diamond-shaped virus and it jams its diamond tip into you.

WILLIE WILSON: Between these plates, it actually gets inside the cell.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: The chinks in the armor.

WILLIE WILSON: That's right, it's like the chinks in the armor.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And the coccolithophore just engulfs it.

WILLIE WILSON: And the virus thinks, "Yes I'm in here!" And then it sort of makes straight to the nucleus.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And it's at that moment that the viral takeover begins. The virus kind of hijacks the cellular machinery that's usually used by the coccolithophore to make more coccolithophore stuff. And it starts making more viruses.

JAD: So inside the coccolithophore there are these little diamonds multiplying.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, they're filling up that space. And eventually all these viruses head out of the coccolithophore.

JAD: In big belches, or ...?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Like a steady stream of viruses.

JAD: Wow!

WILLIE WILSON: And each one of these viruses has the ability to go on and infect another coccolithophore cell.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: In fact, those coccolithophores in that test tube that Willie showed me ...

WILLIE WILSON: If I shake this stuff to the bottom a little bit ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Those were in the process of dying.

WILLIE WILSON: You smell that? Yeah, so that— what you're smelling there, that's the infection. That's dimethyl sulphite compound. So the infection is already occurring in this culture.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And when the coccolithophore dies, those white shields kind of fall off the cell.

WILLIE WILSON: They sort of gradually, sort of rain off over the course of the infection.

JAD: So as it's dying after it's spewed out these viruses it just sheds its plate and it kind of—[coughs] And then it dies.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

JAD: And that creates this white chalkiness.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

ROBERT: And this means that the coccolithophores are not doing very well.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, they've got a couple of tricks up their little calcified sleeves. Sometimes when a virus enters, the coccolithophore will send out a chemical signal.

WILLIE WILSON: They start shouting, "Hey, it's too late for me."

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But save yourselves.

JAD: Oh.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And initially, this signal's pretty weak in the water. But as more and more coccolithophores are infected, the chorus of this chemical beacon grows louder and louder.

WILLIE WILSON: And so the other cells, they hear these messages.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They change by messing with their DNA a bit. And they go from having those white shields on the outside to having these jaggedy scales.

WILLIE WILSON: Which we think might be impenetrable.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Scales instead of these plates and shields.

WILLIE WILSON: That's right, yeah. That's right.

JAD: Why aren't they just scaly all the time?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because when they're scaly, they can't be the best coccolithophores they can be.

JAD: [laughs]

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They just don't grow as well.

JAD: So scaly is an adaptation against the viruses.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Exactly. And then finally, if all else fails ...

WILLIE WILSON: Program cell death.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: The coccolithophores just commit suicide.

WILLIE WILSON: It just shuts down and kills itself to prevent propagation of viruses.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But over time the viruses have figured out how to ...

WILLIE WILSON: Prevent the cell from killing itself.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So it delays the death of the coccolithophore for as long as possible to maximize the number of viruses that can get out.

JAD: Wow, this is serious!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, it's like an arms race.

WILLIE WILSON: There's a constant battle to be fitter than you were several generations ago. And without ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Here's the crazy thing: this battle is happening all through the surface of the ocean. There are legions of coccolithophores dying all the time. And the coccolithophores are shedding their white shields.

WILLIE WILSON: Like taking millions of tiny, little emitters and putting them in the surface of the ocean.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So many that you can actually see this carnage from space.

JAD: You can see this from space?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

WILLIE WILSON: You get massive blooms that cover almost the whole of the—the North Atlantic. You get this sort of milky bloom that covers anything from, you know, off the west coast of Scotland and of southern Iceland almost all the way to Newfoundland. And the Southern Hemisphere, you get this massive milkiness that circumnavigates the globe.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: These vast swirls of milky water curling around islands and continents.

JAD: And that's all carnage from this battle.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Billions and billions of soldiers that have fallen in the field.

JAD: Wow!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: That we can view from space.

JAD: It probably is trillions if you're talking on that scale.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah I think ...

JAD: What's after trillions?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Quadrillion?

JAD: You think we're in the quadrillions? Just say it, see how it feels.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: There are quadrillions of soldiers dying.

JAD: [laughs] How did that feel?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It felt good!

JAD: [laughs]

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: If I were to be an astronaut, how often would I see these sorts of blooms?

WILLIE WILSON: All the time somewhere on the planet.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Every day, every hour?

WILLIE WILSON: Every day, every hour, there's gonna be a bloom going on somewhere. You know, good examples are the Norwegian fjords. They start in the fjords in late April into May time and then they sort of creep out of the fjords like this huge, living amoeba. Fishermen hate it because the fish can't see the lures, so they can't catch the fish anymore.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And as the shields rain off and fall down to the ocean floor, they build up and build up over time ...

WILLIE WILSON: Millions of years of sedimentation of these sort of chalk particles.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: That's actually what led to the creation of the Cliffs of Dover. The White Cliffs of Dover in England?

JAD: Shut up, really?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yes.

WILLIE WILSON: This is geology in action.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And not just that. When the coccolithophores gets decimated by the virus, it kinda clears out the ocean for other phytoplankton to bloom. And then they get mowed down by their viruses. And then the coccolithophores might bloom again and then they get wiped out. And this cycle ...

WILLIE WILSON: I mean, all these battles, I mean it's all responsible for about half the oxygen that we breathe.

ROBERT: Really? Half the oxygen we breathe?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Half the oxygen.

ROBERT: Whoa!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because when the phytoplankton bloom, they take in carbon dioxide and they release a puff of oxygen. And then they're cut down by these viruses but they grow back up again and another breath is released. So the whole system is—is just kinda breathing.

WILLIE WILSON: People think that the lungs of the planet are the rain forests, and that's kinda half the picture, but every other breath we take comes from the phytoplankton in the ocean that are going through these battles on a—you know, on a daily basis.

JAD: So this is a battle that rages every single day, somewhere in our oceans.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. We need the battle to live.

ROBERT: Ari, thank you.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Sure.

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