Let’s talk about the impact of small things. Like plankton. Itty bitty tiny micro organisms that look like something out of a sci-fi film. I think if Lovecraft had had access to the right microscope, Cthulhu would’ve looked a lot different. These babies are important food sources for just about anything that lives in water and are responsible for more than half the oxygen on this planet — that’s right, you’re alive because of the inspiration for an underwater burger thief. You’re welcome.
Aside from that whole breathing-and-basis-for-life thing, plankton show up repeatedly in the collective pop-culture consciousness. They’re in popular children’s television shows and movies, they’re plot devices for comic characters, and they’re the quiet cover up to one of cinema’s greatest plot-twists. So not only do we need them to exist, we’ve woven them into our cultural and social narrative. This is the part where I grab you real hard by the shoulders and go “THEY’RE SUPER IMPORTANT OKAY” and you nod weirdly and pray that someone is bringing alcohol so I’ll chill the eff out.
Hear me out for a second.
Plankton can be broken down into two categories: zooplankton, or animal-like plankton, and phytoplankton, or plant-like plankton. Zooplankton include species that stay plankton their entire lives as well as the larvae and baby versions of species that grow up — crabs, shrimp, jelly fish and the like. Phytoplankton are also known as micro algae and are categorized by how they move — either with a small whip-like protrusion (GIGGITY), dinoflagellates, or relying solely on the water’s current, diatoms. Both types of plankton are crucial food sources for extensive oceanic food webs — everything from shrimps to blue whales can rely on plankton for food.
Think about that — the whales, specifically. A blue whale’s diet consists almost entirely of krill and copepods — or zooplankton — making some of the smallest organisms on this earth responsible for sustaining the existence of the largest.
Like. What? If microscopic plankton being the biggest food source for blue whales doesn’t make the case for small things having big power then let me give you a few more examples.
It’s small things, like plankton, that can be the basis for a movement, for a cultural shift. Look at JK Rowling. Not that anything about Rowling’s life or experience has been small — she’s one of the world’s best-selling and probably most-prominent authors — but what I mean is that Rowling has been where everyone has. The first chapter of the first Harry Potter is folklorically noted as being written on a napkin while Rowling was unemployed and on a train. An unemployed, well-fare receiving, recently orphaned, single-mother on a train wrote the first chapter of an internationally franchised power-house fantasy series on a napkin.
As of July 2015, the books alone have sold approximately $7,743,000,000 — that’s close to $200,000,000 more than the total sales from all 8 movies (and they say our generation doesn’t read). Most days you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone with a deathly hallows tattoo and the franchise now boasts several theme parks worldwide. More than that, studies of Harry Potter fans show that groups who grew up reading the books have a greater tolerance for diverse groups and are prone to being anti-violence and torture, stretching Rowling’s paper-napkin beginnings to more than just financial and cultural influence, but sociological as well.
But if we’re carrying the metaphor through here, then plankton (as Rowling, or Rowling as plankton, maybe) needs to pervade the cultural, sociological, and financial current consciousness — potentially on an international level. For me to convince you that there’s power in the small, then my defense of plankton has to be even more pervasive than Harry Potter.
That’s a toughy.
Can we talk about SpongeBob for a minute? Where is SpongeBob? EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE. If he’s not on your kid’s backpack, then he’s in your Tumblr feed or being re-voiced on Vine talking about smoking weed and giving head. SpongeBob has not only remained a vivid presence in the current K-12 consciousness, he’s been reclaimed and repurposed in some of the deepest subcultures on the internet (whatever you do, do NOT google Spongebob fanfiction. Think of the children).
SpongeBob has been on the air since 1999 (that’s longer than MythBusters but not as long as South Park) and is the single highest-rated series to ever air on Nickelodeon. It’s generated more than $8 billion in revenue for the network and is MTV’s most-distributed property. It’s been attacked by religious nut jobs for “promoting homosexuality” (I would hope so), claims the only animated character wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s, and, internet-legend has it, the theme song for the show is one of the most popular military marching anthems in Russia. There’s been an entire movement to document the appearance of SpongeBob on clothing in Egypt since the 2011 revolution — some say he’s an icon of rebellion, everyone else says they just like the clothes.
And you know who SpongeBob’s arch nemesis is? Plankton — in name and form — a copepod with a mean hankering for the forever secret Krabby Patty Formula (although I feel you could argue that the real struggle of the show is against the continuous presence of working class ennui brought on by the constant inability to overcome the barriers set in place by the institution…or something).
Since the series has been running, viewers have come to see Plankton as less of a “bad guy” and more of an anti-hero, getting to meet his computer-wife, seeing his struggle from the other side, sympathizing with the thief, as it were. I wonder at Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of SpongeBob and a biologist, and his intention behind making one of the most vital organisms on this planet the anti-hero of a multi-billion dollar franchise. Perhaps it was Hillenburg’s own knowledge of the often under appreciated and overlooked existence of plankton. Perhaps Hillenburg believed, like other creators before him, that if he could bring sympathy to the minuscule he could create change. Hillenburg, get at me bro, let’s talk the equity of tragedy here.
But Plankton the Anti-Hero isn’t the only underdog on the fringes to chill with uncharismatic microflora, although he is decidedly the most ambivalent. Aquaman, for example, is very much shoved to the edges of the superhero spectrum but he is still decidedly for good.
For a long time, Aquaman was regarded as “the nerdy nerd’s superhero.” Like, you could be gathered around a table at lunch playing Magic the Gathering in a Pokémon t-shirt with a drawing of your D&D character in your back pocket and the minute someone mentioned liking Aquaman, everyone would deride them for “being a nerd.” It doesn’t get much more meta than that.
But Aquaman is getting a comeback. Hullo Jason Momoa.
Nerdfights aside, Aquaman is important here not because of his cultural pervasiveness like Harry Potter or Spongebob, but because he has used plankton as a tool — which makes Aquaman the original plankton hipster since NASA is spending a chunk of time figuring out how important plankton’s influence is. Obviously Aquaman and NASA are gonna use plankton as tools in different ways because, unless everyone at NASA has some spandex we haven’t heard about yet, their goals are very different.
Yes, Aquaman, in his many iterations through the printed, animated, and now live-action DC universe, has, on more than one occasion, manipulated plankton to do his bidding. Although there is some speculation as to how exactly since apparently he claims to manipulate fish by influencing their mid-brains (the part of the brain responsible for movement and auditory responses) and plankton might not even technically HAVE mid-brains but we’re not here to quibble over different rebirths, incarnations, or universes. The point is that Aquaman can and has manipulated plankton like so many microscopic Fingers of Justice.
In the With the Fishes arc of Aquaman by Will Pfeifer, Patrick Gleason, Christian Alamy, and Nathan Eyring , Aquaman gets into trouble with The Eel, a villain who can telepathically control water (what a killer opposition for Aquaman, right?). The Eel blocks Aquaman from his usual brigade of helpful sea creatures via an impenetrable water prison. But apparently the wall isn’t enough to filter out plankton, and at the last possible suspenseful second, Aquaman uses his microscopic buddies to give the Eel the equivalent of a seizure.
In the very popular and semi-famous animated feature Flashpoint Paradox, Aquaman again utilizes plankton as little microscopic heroes — this time to stop a bomb. This one’s a little more believable as you COULD argue that, since zooplankton include hard bodied organisms and jellyfish babies, there would be enough pressure to push on a button. If you are a plankton expert and would like to answer a few questions about the mass and force required from zooplankton to push a button then hit me up.
So, you can stop dodgily looking around for the kid who was in charge of the beer run — he’s probably not coming and I’m not done talking yet. We’ve seen how plankton has a good impact (Aquaman), an anti-hero impact (Plankton), and now we can slide right on through to fucking awful (corporate lying government entities). That’s quite a spectrum for a micro-organism but I can see you’re still not convinced.
In the 1973 sci-fi classic starring Charlton Heston Soylent Green, the world has been destroyed environmentally by overpopulation and obsessive production, leaving humans to literally live on top of each other and turn to plankton for food in the form of various types of “soylent” product. Soylent is distributed and rationed by the government and is advertised to the general populous as “miracle energy food from the ocean.” But the nummy plankton squares quickly become a front for their more sinister ingredients — namely humans. That’s right, when Heston threw his arms skyward and grit his signature teeth together to exclaim that “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE” he originally thought he and his dystopian buddies were nomming down on plankton.
There’s a lot of real-world parallels to pull from Soylent Green, even in the modern day — global warming, overpopulation, the systematic destruction of the forgotten parts of our population in order to better serve those at the top. Shit even Soylent is a real product and plankton has already been trialed as a food source by both chic Avant Garde restaurants and survivors of war looking to ward off starvation.
Now, when discussing impact, it’s also important to talk about motive — you really can’t have one without the other. It seems that in fiction, plankton exist on either end of two dualities — an animate organism manipulated as an inanimate tool or a fully fleshed-out being with desires, frustrations, and a computer wife. In this case, alignment refers to the dungeons and dragons chart in which characters are cross referenced against three sides and three spectrums: Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic, Good, and Evil. When we move to reality, one could argue that plankton is strictly neutral good.
The neutral portion of that alignment doesn’t necessarily need defending — plankton exist by the laws of the natural world. The animal kingdom doesn’t demand alliances the way one created by a dungeon master would, which allows for plankton to “not feel beholden to leaders” the way a neutral good character would. No, it’s the good portion in reality that needs arguing — as is usually the case when discussing intention in the tangible, factual world.
Plankton are good-aligned because they are unequivocally responsible for life on Earth and more than that, for the balance of that life. And if you dive far enough into the philosophy of fantastic worlds, very rarely is an entity that exudes life in the same way plankton does aligned with the dark side. Any dark or evil creature that holds sway as a building block the way plankton does is only ever aligned with evil when it encourages creation in excess — think swarms or hordes of alien invaders — and plankton, as a part of the oceanic system, does not create in excess because to do so would cause chaos in not only its own system, but every system around it.
Which leads to some very real, very large complications for the existence of these tiny little sci-fi-looking creatures. Changes in climate that have been heavily accelerated in the last 100 or so years, largely in part from human influence, are impacting plankton populations in never before seen ways. Ocean acidification, an excess of carbon in the water, makes it so that carbonate shell building zooplankton have a harder and harder time building themselves. Fluctuations in temperature as the earth gets warmer and warmer mean that phytoplankton blooms take place at very different times. This in turn can mean that the creatures that rely on plankton for food — remember the whales? — either completely alter their own patterns and migrations or go hungry. An inability to recognize human impact on plankton can, over a period of time, lead to a radical decrease or even disappearance of species that are key to the survival of life on this planet as we know it. More than that, we need to recognize the importance of plankton to us. Can you imagine if SpongeBob’s semi-villainous counterpart was a bird or something?
Scientists warn against sensationalism here — it’s called climate change because it takes a long fucking time, otherwise it’s just the weather. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be looking at how our behavior right now will impact what the earth will look like for our grandkids.
So what? It might sound overwhelming to try to change the mind of the entire world — and you know what, it is. But if JK Rowling can write Harry Potter, then why can’t you do something to help shift a change for our environment and for the future world you leave behind? One person still has a circle of influence, still has a voice with which they can be irritating and annoying and loud until someone around them starts to pay attention. And then that next person has a voice, and so on and so forth. The domino effect might not be fool proof but if it’s all you got, then get going — it’s more than a napkin, at least.
If the idea of your grandchildren is freaking you out right now, or is something you can’t wrap your head around, look at it this way: everyone I’ve talked about here wanted something better for those around them, even if it was just a better salary to bring home to their computer wife. Heroes are meant to be — designed to be — humans at their absolute best, a representation of everything our race is capable of and meant for. And sure, flying above beautiful cities in a killer costume draped over a rocking bod is cool and all, but the most important part of a hero is their desire to do good for the present and the future — lawful, neutral, chaotic, or otherwise. If Jason Mamoa would stick up for plankton, then damn it, you should too.
