Scientists Map 5,000 New Ocean Viruses

Carl Zimmer in Quanta:

In March 2011, the Tara, a 36-meter schooner, sailed from Chile to Easter Island — a three-week leg of a five-year global scientific expedition. All but one of the seven scientists aboard the ship spent much of their time on the sun-drenched deck hauling up wondrous creatures such as luminous blue jellyfish and insects known as sea-skaters, which spend their entire lives skimming the surface of the ocean far from land.

At the stern of the Tara, a shipping container was bolted to the deck, with a door and a tiny window cut through the metal walls. One of the scientists, Melissa Duhaime, spent most of the voyage inside the dark, tiny cell, where she fought off an endless bout of seasickness.

“People would come in to see what I was doing and leave pretty quickly,” Duhaime said.

Inside her cell, Duhaime sat next to a hose as wide as an outstretched hand. A pump drew water through the hose from several meters below the boat and then pushed it through a series of filters. Each filter was finer than the last, blocking smaller and smaller life forms. The setup stopped animals first, then zooplankton and algae. The last filter in the hose, with pores just 220 nanometers wide, was fine enough to block bacteria. Scrubbed of all these living things, the water finally flowed into three 30-liter vats.

To the untrained eye, these vats might seem to be full of sterile water. But they were seething with ocean life — or life-like things, at the very least. The three vats held up to 1 trillion viruses.

More here.