December 4th

A lone flamingo at the edge of the sea.

This photo was sent to us by @JessMGallacher, and it shows a flamingo on Porto Timoni beach in Corfu.  To my surprise, there are quite a lot of flamingos on Corfu, mostly at Lake Korission (which is a shallow coastal lagoon).   We don’t associate flamingos with the ocean, but they count because they frequently inhabit the edges of seas.  I picked this photo because the colour of the flamingo reminded me of something important about food chains, and how much we underappreciate the mini factories that get everything started: plants and algae.

Flamingos are famous for being pink, although they can also be orange or white.   But they don’t make the pink colour themselves.  It comes directly from their food, from algae and small crustaceans (and the crustaceans themselves get it from their diet of algae).  If the flamingos don’t eat enough of the right colourful food, they tend towards white, like the one in the picture.  You can find this orange-yellow-pink-red class of pigments all over the animal kingdom, brightening up salmon, canaries, puffins, lobsters and more.  But all of these creatures have filched the pigments from their food and none of them can make it themselves.  It’s not a coincidence that the organisms that are directly fuelled by sunlight – plants and algae – are the ones that make these pigments.  The pigment molecules have two very specific functions which are related to their bright colour: they help collect light for photosynthesis and they protect chlorophyll from sun damage.   The generation of bright colours for the rest of the animal kingdom is just a pretty by-product.

And it’s not just bright colours that get passed up the food chain.  When people talk about the benefits of eating seafood, they often mention fish being a good source of omega-3 fatty acids.  These molecules are really important for the health of humans and other animals, but mammals can’t make them.  The interesting thing is that the fish can’t make them either.    Fish get them from what they eat… algae and tiny plants.    So it’s perfectly possible to be vegan and still get enough omega-3 fatty acids.  You just have to cut out the middle man (the middle fish, really) and eat the algae.   At the moment, farming algae to extract their oil isn’t cheap, but it’s certainly possible.  Once again, the benefits to the rest of the animal kingdom are accidental, but the plants and algae are doing us an enormous favour.  

So we started with a flamingo, but the real heroes are ocean algae.  These little solar-powered sugar factories are busily making a whole ocean grocery store of other useful molecules.  All hail the algae!

See what lies behind all the windows of the Sea Shambles Advent here.

Sea Shambles is a one night only live extravaganza celebrating the oceans. Hosted by Robin Ince and Helen Czerski with Steve Backshall, British Sea Power, Josie Long, Lemn Sissay and more it’s a night of science, comedy, music, lasers and more in which we’ll be turning the Royal Albert Hall into an underwater playground the likes of which you’ve never seen! May 17 2020. Tickets start at just £10! Book here.

Dr Helen Czerski is a physicist, first and foremost, but she’s acquired a few other labels along the way: oceanographer, presenter, author and bubble enthusiast. A regular on The Cosmic Shambles Network, she has also presented a number of acclaimed documentaries for the BBC and Fully Charged.  Recently she was awarded the prestigious William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics.

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