Trillions of invisible organisms produce every other breath you take — and almost no one talks about them. This week, that changes.
Bob is joined once again by Vincent Doumeizel — UN food and ocean advisor, food innovation expert, and author of The Power of Plankton — for a deep dive into the most overlooked organisms on the planet. Vincent explains how plankton produce half the world's oxygen despite making up just 0.02% of Earth's biomass, why they've never once been mentioned at a COP climate summit despite driving a third of global carbon absorption, and how understanding them could be the key to fixing some of our biggest environmental problems.
Along the way: the 100-metre-long animal you've never heard of, why diatoms can build glass shells in freezing water using none of the energy we need to make glass on land, how plankton clean your drinking water, the surprising rise of jellyfish, and why Vincent thinks we should be teaching kids about plankton instead of dinosaurs.
It's a conversation that reframes how you'll think about a single drop of water and makes a genuinely hopeful case for what's still left to discover.
In this episode:
- Why Vincent moved from working on world hunger to seaweed, and then to plankton
- What plankton actually is (it's a behaviour, not a species) — and why jellyfish, viruses, and bacteria all count
- How phytoplankton invented photosynthesis billions of years ago — and once poisoned the planet with oxygen
- Why half of all the oxygen we breathe comes from organisms that make up almost none of the planet's biomass
- The Plankton Manifesto: bringing 30 of the world's top scientists together to put plankton on the UN's radar
- How plankton could help us cut carbon, replace plastic packaging, fuel planes, and even light cities
- Why Vincent remains optimistic about the future of the ocean, despite the scale of the crisis
About the guest: Vincent Doumeizel is an advisor to the United Nations, a food innovation expert, and the author of The Power of Plankton and The Seaweed Revolution. He has spent his career working at the intersection of food systems, ocean health, and climate, and recently spoke to an audience of nine million listeners on the BBC about the importance of plankton.
Links & resources:
- 📖 The Power of Plankton by Vincent Doumeizel — [link]
- 📖 The Seaweed Revolution by Vincent Doumeizel — [link]
- 🔗 Vincent Doumeizel Profile — [link]
- 🔗 The UN Plankton Manifesto — [link]
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