Gently gliding like spectres in the midnight black depths, these zooplankton are the subject of the latest crowdsourcing science project from the Zooniverse team that brought us Galaxy Zoo.
These eerie images of fantastical zooplankton
The Plankton Portal project calls for online volunteers to donate some time classifying the size, orientation and type of plankton in millions of images captured by ISIIS.
The ISIIS robot works quickly: in a three-day excursion, it papped so much plankton that it would take the research team from the University of Miami and Oregon State University three years to analyse if they were working alone. It's no good putting a computer on the case – it could tell a shrimp from a jellyfish, but the human eye is much better at detecting the differences between intricate arrays of species from the same family.
Understanding plankton will improve our a global view of the function and health of the ocean – small they may be, but they are major players in the carbon cycle.
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
Have your say
Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.
Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
