Phycoplankton

Author: vpochic

  • Frog feet

    , ,

    A few days ago, a colleague of mine asked me how biologists decide which microalga is their favourite. (She’s a physicist, I guess these strange people have favourite equations or something.) That got me thinking. What’s the coolest microbial species? Of course, the answer will depend on who you ask, because the notion of “cool”…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • Prokaryote/Eukaryote

    , ,

    Where we explore the relatively young history of a fundamental divide in the tree of Life. A deliberately short history of systematics Systematics is the science of classifying life forms. As with almost anything in science, the first traceable attempts at classifying life date back to Aristotle. In his treaty The History of Animals (4th…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • Dead gods

    , ,

    Following is an extract from André Lwoff‘s lecture “The Concept of Virus“, given before the Society for General Microbiology on April 15th, 1957. I attempted to translate it into French just after. If you want to read the entire lecture (which I can only recommend), you can access it here : The Concept of Virus…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • AI for bibliography: a cautionary tale

    , ,

    For a few years now, it seems to me that more and more people in research have been using generative AI for quite a lot of stuff (bold take, I know). At an ecology conference in 2024, I witnessed a lot of slideshows (including one of the plenary talks) illustrated with obviously AI-generated images, of…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • The sorcerer’s apprentices of photosynthesis

    , , ,

    This is the third part of my series on Dinophysis. If you didn’t read the first and second part, go read them and come back! We’ve now seen how Dinophysis was finally cultivated in the lab: by feeding it with its prey, the ciliate Mesodinium rubrum. Both of these microbes thrive by acquiring chloroplasts from foreign origin.…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • The gingerbread house strategy

    , ,

    In these winter times, it is tempting to spend the evening sitting by the fire, reading old fairy tales. You’ve probably heard of Hansel and Gretel, a story of 2 children being lured into a gingerbread house by a cannibalistic witch? Well, today’s the day for some planktonic Hansel and Gretel. Meet the witch: Orbulina…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • Life on the walls

    ,

    Written by

    vpochic

  • On swimming

    , ,

    Swimming: the act or art of sustaining and propelling the body in water. On our blue planet, many life forms were once faced with the same question: how do I move through that aqueous medium towards that prey/shelter/sexual partner over there? What I want to discuss here is how many possible answers there are to…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • A video (in french) about interactions in phytoplankton blooms

    , ,

    The title says it all. This is a video I put together with some images and results of mine, and some CC BY images and music. Big thanks to all the people who create and share CC BY media on Commons, Free Music Archive and elsewhere on the web. Enjoy. This video itself is under…

    Written by

    vpochic

  • La vie en mer

    Un bateau c’est un monde de nœuds, de bruits, de peintures écaillées. Un monde d’habitudes où le temps est rythmé par les quarts et les repas au carré. C’est un langage où bosco, bâbord, manœuvre, côtoient bout, milles et passerelle. On se demande si on est mardi ou mercredi. On ne fait jamais la cuisine…

    Written by

    vpochic