Word: plankton
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Director Seagal can't shoot straight either. The choppy pace and inane plot exertions make On Deadly Ground a $40 million vanity epic. At least Warner Bros., Seagal's sponsor, cut the star's climactic lecture on the environment -- antibusiness and boldly pro-plankton -- from a reported 10 minutes to just over three. It's fine to think an audience is stupid but not to leave it in a stupor...
...evidence centers on sea-plankton remains found in the Transantarctic Mountains at altitudes where no sea should have been. By measuring the age of nearby volcanic ash, a team led by Peter Barrett at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, concluded that the whole area was probably flooded during the mid-Pliocene epoch -- when temperatures were only a few degrees warmer than today...
...water." Fish is the only major food group that lives and feeds in the wild. And compared with beef cattle and chickens, which eat mainly grasses and grain, many fish are high up in the food chain. In a process called biomagnification, tiny fish pick up contaminants from the plankton they feed on in polluted waters, concentrating heavy metals like methylmercury in their organs. The little fish in turn are eaten by larger fish, further concentrating the toxins. In big, finned predators like swordfish and tuna, the contaminants can reach levels that may be harmful to the next link...
...example: preserving the atmosphere -- stopping ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect -- is an environmental necessity. In April scientists reported that ozone damage is far worse than previously thought. Ozone depletion not only causes skin cancer and eye cataracts, it also destroys plankton, the beginning of the food chain atop which we humans...
Scientists do not know exactly why cholera periodically explodes into epidemics. The bacteria that cause it are part of the aquatic ecosystem, helping to break down dead shellfish. Cholera germs travel up the food chain by attaching themselves to plankton, which are eaten by fish and then by people. Studies by Rita Colwell, professor of microbiology at the University of Maryland, suggest that a plankton bloom, a rapid growth like the one reported off the coast of Peru earlier this year, may help trigger epidemics...