Name: 【TED-Ed】The secret life of plankton - Tierney Thys
Uploaded: 2013-07-18T14:40:23.000Z
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Well, it's a stranger story than you might think.

"Plankton comes from the Greek planktos for wandering"

from clams and crabs to sea urchins and anemones.

We drifting animals are called zooplankton.

but you'd never find a place more diverse than my childhood home.

can contain more than a million living creatures.

It can be a pretty tough existence, though.

but this crab larva is an arrow worm's worst nightmare.

Epic battles between carnivores like these are just one way to get food.

But the real powers of this place come from phytoplankton:

that transforms sunlight and carbon dioxide into

Phytoplankton are the base for the largest food web in the world.

many animals like me would rise up from the depths

I was part of the largest daily migration of life on Earth.

I'd return to the darkness, where I'd join my bizarre companions.

Cannibals, like this sea butterfly mollusk,

that beat cilia like rainbowed eyelashes.

Some of these snare their prey with sticky tentacles,

while others just take a bite out of their cousins.

that catch prey with toxic fishing lures.

But my favorite would have to be the crustacean Phronima;

its monstrous looks inspired the movie "Aliens."

With two sets of eyes, this female prowls the deeper water.

she performs one of the strangest behaviors in the entire animal kingdom.

she delicately assembles a barrel-like home

feeding her young until they can drift off and survive on their own.

Best of all, they make the perfect snack for a small fish like me.

even scientists don't know who eats whom.

There's so much more to me than just a tasty meal.

Written By : Tierney Thys & Christian Sardet