Last universal common ancestor (LUCA) lived about 3.5 billion years ago; it is the name for the first species on Earth in the primordial ocean. A hive of bees is a superorganism. Hydrogen sulfide is a gas that is extremely poisonous to mammals. Bacterial nanowires form when bacteria need to respire.
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LearningTranscript
00:00There could be an undiscovered species lurking on the surface of the earth.
00:10But this creature is unlike any life form we've ever imagined.
00:20Its body could span thousands of miles.
00:24It has a heart that beats once every thousand years.
00:29And an immune system that could wipe out nearly all life on earth.
00:36It may even have a brain.
00:40Could the vast ocean itself be a living, thinking creature?
00:46If so, what does it think of us?
00:56Space. Time.
00:59Life itself.
01:03The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:07We've always looked to the stars for signs of other intelligent life, but we may be staring in the wrong direction.
01:15A non-human intelligence far more sophisticated than our own could be right here on earth.
01:24Could be right here on earth.
01:25Our vast ocean is this planet's last frontier.
01:32Some scientists are asking, not what, but who it is.
01:46Have you ever felt someone's presence but you couldn't see them?
01:54When I walked in the woods as a kid, it often seemed like the trees were aware of me.
02:00Sometimes I thought I could hear them talking.
02:05I wondered, could the whole forest be a conscious being?
02:09Could the whole forest be a conscious being?
02:17Could the whole forest be a conscious being?
02:22Could the whole forest be a conscious being?
02:26I've been obsessed with the chemical that is the foundation of all life on Earth.
02:34Liquid H2O. Water.
02:38When I was a kid, I would spend like every summer, maybe five hours a day,
02:43swimming in the lakes, just playing around in the water.
02:47And these days, I love just to hang out in the water.
02:50It's just a beautiful experience to feel like your body is dissolving into the water.
02:56When Anders became a chemist, his obsession with water grew even deeper.
03:03Water has its ability to form what's called hydrogen bonds,
03:08where a hydrogen atom in one water molecule could bond to an oxygen atom in another water molecule.
03:15Harnessing the power of the Stanford Linear Accelerator,
03:19Anders took X-ray images of liquid H2O molecules
03:24and discovered that groups of water molecules perform an elaborate synchronized choreography.
03:31The
03:59A single molecule of H2O is like a single swimmer.
04:05Each can move along freely, or it can link arms with a neighbor to form a rigid structure.
04:13Below freezing, the molecules join at angles and take up more space.
04:18This is why water expands when it turns to ice.
04:22Liquid water contains both freewheeling molecules and rigid clusters simultaneously.
04:29These structures form or break apart depending on temperature.
04:36But Anders discovered that water molecules also change their routine depending on what's
04:41mixed in with them.
04:42So here I have a sodium chloride crystal.
04:45This is just ordinary salt, like you have in your food, what we have in the ocean.
04:50So if you look at this example.
04:56When ordinary table salt comes into contact with a rigid formation of water molecules,
05:03that formation breaks apart.
05:06This creates more free-floating molecules that break salt crystals apart and spread them throughout
05:13the body of water.
05:16Other chemicals have a different effect.
05:20So here we have a very strongly, highly charged ion.
05:23This can be like a magnesium or aluminum ion.
05:26And then we're going to throw in this and we're going to form an ice-like structure around it.
05:37Water molecules lock around the ion and hold it in place.
05:43To us, a glass of water seems still and lifeless.
05:51But on the molecular scale, it is pulsing with activity.
05:58Water changes its molecular structure around one trillion times per second.
06:05Whenever the molecular structure of water changes, the overall chemical properties of water also
06:11change.
06:13No other liquids on Earth can do this.
06:17Water molecules respond to temperature and the chemicals they come in contact with, almost
06:23as if the water is aware of its surroundings.
06:27For Anders, this property blurs the distinction between a chemical and a living thing.
06:37Some people might think that a glass of water could be alive.
06:42My personal view of life is that it's related to something that has consciousness on some sort
06:48of level.
06:50And the question is, if that is the case with water, and we can't say yes or no.
06:59Whether or not a glass of water is alive, water itself is still the essence of all life that
07:05we know of.
07:08About 60% of your body is water.
07:11Cells with your DNA call it home, along with about 1,000 unique species of bacteria.
07:18The ocean ecosystem is also mostly water and home to millions of life forms.
07:26Could ocean water and the life that calls it home collectively be a living thing?
07:32Is a life form that large even possible?
07:42Evolutionary biologist Gustavo Caetano Annoyas suspects it was.
07:48He's tracking down Earth's first life form, the creature at the root of the tree of life.
07:54A tree of life is a hierarchical structure.
07:58That means that if you travel back in time, you are traveling to an organism that at some
08:03point embedded all the diversity that was generated later on.
08:09And this is the last universal common ancestor of Luca.
08:17Luca is the scientific nickname for the first species on Earth.
08:22It lived about three and a half billion years ago and is common ancestor to all life today.
08:29Luca cells likely filled the primordial ocean, unhindered by any competing organism.
08:37Luca has been extinct for billions of years.
08:43But Gustavo believes he can reconstruct what its cells looked like by studying the details
08:50of life's machinery today.
08:52For Gustavo, finding the elements essential to the earliest life form is like figuring out
08:59how the very first bicycle worked.
09:03Bikes are permanently changing.
09:05Every ten years we will have new developments, new mechanisms, new electronics added to them.
09:11In contrast, the structure of a bike is rather permanent.
09:17Bikes today come with a variety of sophisticated gears and high-tech materials.
09:22But all share common essential structures.
09:25Without them, a bike cannot function.
09:30In the first bike, I would find seats, pedals, wheels, because these seem to be common to
09:38all bikes that I can study today.
09:42With a list of these fundamental parts, Gustavo can reconstruct the last universal common ancestor
09:48of bicycles.
09:52The penny farthing.
09:56The first machine to be called a bicycle.
10:02It had a seat, pedals, and wheels, but didn't need a chain or gears to move.
10:10Gustavo applied this same philosophy to his hunt for Luca.
10:15By comparing the fossil records to the genetic record of thousands of organisms, Gustavo worked
10:21out which proteins existed about 3.5 billion years ago.
10:28He generated a list of fundamental parts that Luca must have had.
10:33To his surprise, he discovered that unlike all life we know of today, Luca probably did
10:40not have a well-sealed cell wall.
10:42It is quite possible that the cell walls of Luca were porous and that they would allow for
10:49fast exchange between the different Luca cells of genetic information and also of actual machinery.
10:59Think of a Luca cell as a penny farthing bicycle.
11:04Because its cell wall was full of holes, important parts could come loose and float away.
11:12Water molecules could, however, react to this escaped part and form a supportive mold around
11:17the other.
11:18Until it drifts into another Luca cell where that part could be reused.
11:24Luca cells depended on one another and water chemistry to keep the entire colony alive.
11:35Gustavo believes that, rather than being many distinct organisms, these cells behaved like parts
11:46of a single giant cooperative being, a superorganism.
11:54As multicellular organisms are made of individual cells, a superorganism is composed of many organisms
12:01that are interacting heavily with each other.
12:07A superorganism is a creature made up of many individuals, like the hive of bees.
12:15If Gustavo is correct, the very first life forms on Earth were not isolated microscopic cells,
12:22but rather the vast ocean itself, a superorganism that covered nearly the entire planet.
12:30We might all be descendants of a single supermassive creature.
12:38Billions of years have passed since the time of Luca.
12:42Is the ocean still a superorganism?
12:47One scientist is trying to find out by studying whether the ocean, as a whole, has an appetite.
13:00How do you know whether something is alive?
13:05It is a question great minds have argued over for centuries.
13:12To the philosopher René Descartes, the answer was, I think, therefore I am.
13:21But biologists have come up with a different criterion.
13:25One that could reveal a new form of life.
13:29The answer could be, I eat, therefore I am.
13:41New York University's Tyler Volk believes, like every biologist, that all living things have
13:47a metabolism.
13:48A metabolism is a biologically active process that breaks down certain chemical compounds
14:00into smaller constituents and then rearranges those constituents.
14:08Every creature you can think of on the planet has a metabolism.
14:15Things inside these creatures extract energy from nutrients, then discard the leftovers.
14:22The ocean is filled with life forms that do this.
14:26But the ocean itself is not usually considered a living being.
14:31Instead, it is thought of as an enormous recycler.
14:39Some of the elements in the ocean are recycled hundreds of times in and out of the useful
14:45forms that can be taken back up by life again, over and over again.
14:51But when Tyler took a closer look at the ocean's recycling system, the numbers didn't add up.
14:58Life in the ocean recycles essential nutrients like carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, and sulfur through
15:04a process of life and death.
15:07Life feeds on life, which feeds life, which feeds other life, and life is renewed.
15:17It's a near perfect recycling system.
15:21Tyler has tracked precisely how efficiently each of these nutrients gets reused.
15:27His analysis reveals that not every life-sustaining element in the ocean is 100% recycled.
15:34The calculations show that as marvelous as these biochemical cycles are inside the ocean,
15:40they're not perfect.
15:43There is a need for fresh elements, the chemical elements essential to life.
15:50Tyler argues this imperfect recycling means that the ocean, a giant system of life, has a metabolism.
15:59Just like us, the ocean feeds.
16:03So what we call the mouth of the river, you can think of as the mouth of the ocean.
16:09These are the portals by which very important materials come into the ocean.
16:14And, after it metabolizes its food from rivers, it excretes waste into the ocean floor.
16:24In the ocean, there will be waste byproducts.
16:27There will be certain compounds that will go into the sediments, get covered up, do not
16:32get recycled by the microbes or by the worms.
16:38Tyler thinks that even though they feed on one another, life forms in the ocean are ultimately
16:44working together, like organs inside a body.
16:49One group, which includes fish and mammals, works like the human respiratory system.
16:55It takes in oxygen and carbon and transforms it into carbon dioxide.
17:02Another group, ocean plant life, takes carbon dioxide and transforms it into oxygen.
17:10Another group, comprised of bacteria, processes nitrogen into ammonia.
17:20For Tyler, treating groups of life forms in the ocean as metabolic organs in a giant body
17:26is not just a metaphor.
17:28It could reveal exactly how the ocean as a whole will react to chemical changes on planet Earth.
17:36To know how the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will respond to changes that humans may make
17:42in their industrial processes, one has to understand the entire cycle of carbon.
17:46And that's going along with other nutrients such as phosphates carrying the phosphorus, nitrates
17:52carrying the nitrogen.
17:54And so all these are tied together into one great tightly interconnected coupled metabolic
18:01super system.
18:04It is a form of super life.
18:07Tyler thinks that if the ocean is a form of super life, it will, like all living things,
18:13react when threatened.
18:16Many scientists believe that we are poisoning Earth's waters.
18:21Does the ocean and all the life within it have a collective will to live?
18:28And what will it do to stay alive?
18:34When our bodies get sick, an army of cells, tissues, and organs work together to protect
18:42us and fight off disease?
18:45What happens when the ocean gets sick?
18:49Does it have an immune system of its own?
18:53And what happens when this immune system kicks in?
19:03Mainstream science does not typically consider the ocean to be a living being.
19:09That hasn't stopped geologist Lee Klump from studying its physiology.
19:15Physiology is a study of how organisms work.
19:18It's a study of the whole organism, how it functions as a living being.
19:26All living organisms obey the same basic rules of physiology, no matter how big they are
19:34or how small.
19:35When you think about a fly, it has the same physiological mechanisms that we have in our
19:40own body.
19:41And key to this is the circulation system of the fly.
19:44Really, the only difference is its heart beats five times per second, ours about once
19:49per second.
19:53So now we scale up to something like the ocean.
19:56And it too has a heartbeat.
19:57That heart rate is about once every thousand years.
20:02The ocean's thousand year long heartbeat begins in the north and south poles.
20:09Water gathers oxygen from the Arctic and Antarctic air.
20:13As the water cools, it sinks to the bottom, bringing oxygen to deep sea light.
20:20Flows along the dark abyss until it reaches the equator where it warms and rises to the surface.
20:29It moves towards the poles and the cycle repeats.
20:33So the ocean's just like the human body needs to circulate for it to function.
20:41Whenever harmful microbes get inside us, immune system cells rush to the site of invasion
20:48and neutralize the threat.
20:53He argues that the ocean's thousand year current is a true physiological circulation system because
21:01it too delivers antibodies to infection sites.
21:06Every circulatory system has an essential player.
21:09In our bodies and our bloodstream, it's our cells.
21:12And in the ocean, it's bacteria.
21:15In humans, outside bacteria are usually a threat to be fought off by our immune systems.
21:22But in the ocean, bacteria are the immune system.
21:27They're very tiny.
21:28They don't sink.
21:30And so they get carried around with the circulation of the ocean.
21:34They can break down harmful substances.
21:36They can detoxify them.
21:39The ocean is home to bacteria that travel on the currents and break apart harmful metals,
21:44toxic chemicals, oil spills, and just about every harmful substance that can work its way
21:50into the ocean.
21:58Just like life on a college campus, keeping everybody safe is a team effort.
22:08Imagine an arsonist who sets the student center ablaze.
22:13The first responders are the firefighters.
22:17In the ocean, these are the bacteria that feed on a newly arrived toxin and multiply.
22:24This is the bacteria being transported with the ocean currents.
22:28Where there's a toxin introduced to the system, the bacteria thrive and detoxify.
22:35Once the toxin is eliminated, the bacteria die off, just like the first responders who leave
22:41after the fire is out.
22:43But they leave behind a bunch of byproducts.
22:46So the bacteria are producing waste, that's influencing the chemistry of the oceans.
22:52As the ocean's chemistry changes, that in turn influences the bacteria themselves.
22:58This instigates another wave of bacterial helpers.
23:02And another.
23:03Until conditions stable enough for normal life return.
23:09And the harmful toxin is completely neutralized.
23:24But just because the ocean has an immune system does not mean that it's invulnerable to catastrophe.
23:32When our immune systems overreact, we develop severe diseases like multiple sclerosis.
23:39These immune systems can overreact and they can produce too much antibody.
23:44They can, they can disrupt the physiology of the organism.
23:49In the ocean, we can get that same sort of overreaction and carry us into a whole new
23:53state of the ocean, an unhealthy state.
24:00Our immune system protects you from disease.
24:05But if it overreacts, it can kill you instead.
24:10What would happen if the immune system of the ocean overreacts?
24:14It may have already happened at least five times in Earth's history, resulting in the extermination
24:22of nearly every living thing on the planet.
24:28When a honeybee perceives a threat to its hive, it will sting its victim and release toxic venom
24:36that can be fatal.
24:38After the bee stings, it dies.
24:42The honeybee's instinct is to defend its hive at any cost.
24:48Will life in the ocean do the same?
25:01Peter Ward is an oceanic paleontologist who likes to get up close and personal with the
25:07subject of his studies.
25:08I dive a lot, and my science requires it.
25:12And yet, I come back, I just can't describe in words what it's like.
25:16I just cannot bring out the vision of what I'm seeing and thinking down there.
25:20Movies are way better.
25:22I bring back small videos, and you really get a sense, I think.
25:25Picture may be worth a thousand words, but a short video is worth millions of words.
25:31But don't let Peter's tranquil footage fool you.
25:35Beneath the waves, Peter is looking at a crime scene where millions of species all across the
25:42globe suddenly wound up dead.
25:45So, 99.999999% of all individuals, a mass extinction not only wipes out species, but
25:53it really empties the Earth of life.
25:56These are really hideous events.
25:59For years, scientists thought that all mass extinctions were caused by climate change brought
26:06on by asteroid impacts and massive volcanic eruptions.
26:12Peter thinks there's another mass killer.
26:26We started looking at the other mass extinction boundaries, and none of the evidence of an
26:31asteroid collision was showing up.
26:33In fact, something quite different.
26:38Peter and his colleagues have studied the fossil evidence and pinpointed the murder
26:42weapon, a lethal chemical that can be found in trace amounts on nearly every shoreline
26:49on Earth.
26:50Oh, look at this.
26:52Oh.
26:53So what makes this so stinky, and it really is stinky, it's full of hydrogen sulfide.
26:59Hydrogen sulfide is a gas that is extremely poisonous to wee mammals.
27:05There are many bacteria who love it, who need it to live, but not our kind.
27:08Those of us who use oxygen, who love oxygen, this is a very, very bad, bad poison.
27:14As few as 500, 600 of these molecules in a million molecules of air will kill you.
27:21This is the stuff that literally sits at the bottom of the ocean.
27:26Peter believes the bacteria that produced this deadly nerve gas have waged chemical warfare
27:33on the entire planet, in the sea and on land, resulting in the death of nearly every living creature.
27:43And it has happened at least five times.
27:53Peter wants to predict when this lethal bacterial plague will overrun the ocean and flood our atmosphere
27:59with hydrogen sulfide again.
28:03All right, let's say that this is nice, cold, oxygenated water.
28:07And it's been moving up from the Gulf Stream in the north towards Europe, getting colder and colder and colder.
28:14And finally, it's cold enough, it sinks.
28:18And when it sinks, what happens?
28:22We get this nice, oxygenated bottom water that covers the bottom of the oceans, keeps the oceans healthy.
28:29So we have this nice circulation system.
28:34But that can change if oxygen-rich seawater stops sinking to the ocean floor where it's needed.
28:41The deep sea, if there is no oxygen in it, starts favoring other types of bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide.
28:53When the ocean surface warms by just a few degrees or is flooded with fresh water,
28:59it becomes less dense than the water beneath it.
29:04So let's make a really, really, really warm world.
29:08Instead of that nice, cold oxygen water, let's pour in this nice, hot, low oxygen water.
29:18You can see the hot water stays right on the top.
29:21It doesn't go down and take the nice oxygen down.
29:23We, instead, have a system without an oxygen export to the bottom.
29:28And the net result, in the end, is mass extinction.
29:33Without oxygen in the deep sea, hydrogen sulfide-producing bacteria thrive and fill the ocean with poisonous violet sludge.
29:45Large plumes of toxic yellow hydrogen sulfide explode and blanket the atmosphere.
29:53Plants are suffocated to death.
29:56Animals die from poisoning.
29:59Human life would be impossible to sustain.
30:05Could it happen again?
30:06Absolutely.
30:10Peter thinks that if we warm up the planet by just a few degrees, the ocean could make us pay the ultimate price.
30:18But for Peter, that does not mean the ocean is itself a living thing.
30:24Microbiologist Yuri Gorby is taking a different approach.
30:29He's found evidence that suggests the ocean ecosystem is a living superorganism with the capacity to think.
30:40Does the ocean have a brain?
30:47How did we get our brain power?
30:51Well, during millions of years of evolution, groups of cells developed electrical connections to one another and became complex networks.
31:01The entire ocean seems to have a similar network.
31:07Has it evolved to be intelligent like us?
31:12Or has it surpassed us?
31:16Microbiologist Yuri Gorby is part of a team that has made a major discovery.
31:22It's one that could forever change how we look at life in the ocean.
31:27But it started with a humble question.
31:31How do microorganisms breathe?
31:35Now we think that breathing in is respiration, but that's really inhalation.
31:39True respiration in our body occurs in mitochondria.
31:43Respiration is the movement of electrons from an electron donor to an appropriate electron acceptor.
31:51Most species respire by dumping electrons onto oxygen atoms inside their mitochondria.
31:59But a lot of aquatic bacteria respire with a different technique.
32:04They dump electrons onto metals dissolved in seawater.
32:09Yuri wanted to see what happened when he robbed these aquatic bacteria of their life-sustaining metals.
32:16We expected that these organisms would basically suffocate and perish.
32:21But that is not what we observed.
32:23What we saw blew our minds.
32:28Yuri's bacteria survived and grew what appeared to be a vast scaffolding of tiny hairs.
32:36I sent some samples to a friend of mine, and she put them under one of her microscopes,
32:40a scanning tunneling microscope.
32:42She applied current.
32:44She called me up and said, you're not going to believe this.
32:48I rushed over to her lab, and what I observed was that these little filaments actually had electronic or conductive properties.
33:00I could not sleep for days after seeing those results.
33:04It was just remarkable.
33:06The tiny fibers were not hairs at all.
33:12Yuri discovered they were electrically conductive filaments.
33:16He named them bacterial nanowires.
33:21These nanowires form when bacteria need to respire.
33:25But they stick around when conditions return to normal.
33:28In our brains, we have about 100 billion electrically connected cells that process our thoughts.
33:37Yuri believes that the ocean also contains vast electrical networks that comprise up to 100 trillion trillion bacterial cells.
33:49This network is highly interconnected, just like the one in our brain.
33:55It, too, may be capable of thought.
34:01So what do we have here?
34:03We have a cell represented by this light bulb sending a signal down a wire.
34:10This little junction, it has to make a decision.
34:13Which way do we propagate that signal, to the left or to the right?
34:19When a signal propagates through a digital computer, it encounters transistors which decide whether to turn it into a 1 or a 0, left or right.
34:31In an organic computer, the transistors are replaced by cells which can pass the signal on to one or more of potentially thousands of connected cells.
34:43When multitudes of these cells are interconnected, a network emerges that can process vast amounts of information.
34:57If you really ponder the question, can the ocean think, you have to expand your mind.
35:03It's the same way as, can a single bacterium think?
35:07No.
35:08Can a community of microorganism think?
35:11Perhaps.
35:13Expand that further.
35:15Can the ocean process information and think?
35:19I say absolutely.
35:21The ocean could have a brain made up of bacterial nanowires that exist all through the upper layers of ocean sediment.
35:32This brain could be capable of thoughts very different from our own.
35:38There are 100 trillion trillion cells in the ocean sediment, far more than the number of neurons we have.
35:47And the ocean's electrical network fires over a thousand times faster than our neural network.
35:54Eura suspects that this brain network is spread across 140 million square miles of ocean floor.
36:02If so, its thoughts would play out over hundreds if not thousands of years.
36:09So what could the ocean be thinking?
36:14The ocean's been around a long time.
36:16And those organisms that are at the bottom of the ocean, possibly integrated into these neural networks,
36:21they've been around for billions of years.
36:24So it's probably very contemplative thought.
36:28If the ocean ecosystem collectively forms a living, thinking being, it could see us as a threat to its survival.
36:38It may decide to immunize itself against us.
36:43We could be wiped out.
36:47But we are also intelligent creatures.
36:51Couldn't we learn how to read the ocean's mood?
36:54We could be on the verge of killing the ocean.
37:00Or is the ocean ready to wipe us out?
37:07Determining the health of this massive body of water is a huge task.
37:12But it's a necessary one.
37:15The answer could tell us how much time we have left.
37:22David Markayese is a research biologist who likes to look at complex ecosystems
37:28from a bird's eye view.
37:31A city is basically an ecosystem of its own.
37:34And we could consider this an ecosystem.
37:36And if we look at each train as a food chain, then we can measure nutrient flow.
37:45The food chain transports nutrients from organism to organism throughout an ecosystem,
37:51just as trains move food to whoever needs it.
37:55If the train stops running, food becomes scarce.
38:00And the whole town risks collapse.
38:04Knowing if the trains are running in a model city in your basement is easy.
38:09But when it comes to the ocean, researchers are in the dark.
38:15Well, the ocean is an extremely, extremely complex ecosystem.
38:19As ecologists, it's very difficult to look at an ocean.
38:23It's just so big.
38:24And it's composed of many, many different ecosystems.
38:28But David thinks he knows what to look for to determine the condition of the ocean.
38:34and the difficile is macam a defense.
38:36And it's called the ocean of the ocean.
38:39Parasites.
38:43These tiny monsters survive by laying eggs into their hosts
38:45where they grow and multiply.
38:48Some slowly kill their host over years of painful invasion.
38:54But David sees them in a different light.
38:57in a different light yeah they really do have an awful awful reputation and and
39:06it's it's not surprising to think why there's a big yuck factor because if you catch a fish
39:13and it's covered in parasitic cysts or you open up a cod and it has a cod worm inside
39:19most people don't want to eat the fish it's just extra protein in most cases but anyway
39:27in individual animals parasites are often signs of disease but for ecosystems a rich diversity of
39:36parasites is an indication of good health because parasites like the seal worm rely on a food chain
39:44linking many thriving species the adults live in seal stomachs and there they reproduce and eggs
39:51are passed out into the water the eggs settle and a tiny larva hatches a crustacean comes along and
40:02ingests the lava that crustacean is eaten by a larger crustacean which is eaten by one of many different
40:10species of fish which most seals find tasty inside the seal stomach the worms mate and lay eggs
40:21the eggs drop out through the feces and the cycle repeats in one life cycle a parasite can travel
40:30through the dinner of multiple species and potentially thousands of miles of ocean water
40:36if something is going wrong with any host along the way the parasite dies
40:44when you have a healthy ecosystem with a good amount of diversity or biodiversity in it
40:48you will see more internal parasites that have complex life cycles
40:53to test an ecosystem david takes a census of its parasites
40:58even though david can't see the whole ecosystem the parasites tell him that nutrients are properly
41:10cycling through it we think of each parasite as a little light green light is one species and a red light
41:17is another species we can then watch them follow this linear path up the food chain stopping along the
41:25way at the various stops which reflect the different hosts in their life cycles
41:31if populations of parasites begin to disappear it could mean that there are breaks in the food chain
41:39and the environment is headed towards catastrophe
41:44david monitors the ecological health of the rivers and lakes across canada by surveying the parasite
41:49populations doing the same for the ocean will be a herculean task but david hopes one day to take it on
42:01the ocean is such a vast habitat it's another frontier you would need the kind of resources
42:07you need to go to the moon scientists don't know what's really out there in the sea
42:13and no one knows how far the ocean can be pushed before catastrophe strikes
42:27the ocean may have a will to live or it may react unthinkingly to our insults
42:35either way we should not underestimate the power it has over all life on the planet
42:41earth with its millions of species the ocean might be the most remarkable creature we'll ever meet
42:49the largest and oldest life form on earth
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