Laser-controlled sea monkeys make big waves

Wednesday, October 1, 2014, 2:23 PM - A new study out of the Caltech Institute of Technology suggests that weather isn't the only thing that can influence massive ocean waves. As it turns out, tiny organisms play a big role as well.

Researchers have discovered that brine shrimp -- tiny creatures commonly referred to as sea monkeys -- can make big waves.

The small shrimp are about half an inch in length and when billions of them get together they may be able influence the ocean just much as the wind and tides.

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They theory has been around for awhile, and was first touched upon in 2009 when a team led by professor John Dabiri at Caltech conducted study on how jellyfish generated flow on the water around it.

"These new lab experiments show that similar effects can occur in organisms that are much smaller but also more numerous—and therefore potentially more impactful in regions of the ocean important for climate," Dabiri says in a statement. 

A time lapse demonstrating sea monkeys (white) creating swirling eddies among suspended, yellow particles in the water. (M. Wilhelmus and J.O. Dabiri |Caltech)

In the wild brine shrimp live in salty water and their routines are dictated by the light, or rather, the absence of it.

During the da, the shrimp stay in the deep, dark portions of the ocean. At night they swim to the surface to dine on algae.

In the lab Dabiri and his team used blue and green lasers to entice the shrimp to swim to the top of a tank of water that was filled with silver-coated, hollow glass spheres.

Scientists were able to document how the shrimp were influencing the water by tracking the motion of the spheres.

And the results were impressive.

Based on the experiment Dabiri argues that adding up the effect of all of the zooplankton in the ocean—assuming they have a similar influence—could inject as much as a trillion watts of power into the oceans to drive global circulation.

The complete study has been published in the journal Physics of Fluids.