This website is sponsored by INNE
 |
 |
 |
 Tara Oceans – Partners |
Four Reasons to learn Protists!
Evolution players
1These tiny organisms are highly diverse, and have performed as key ecological players in evolutionary theatres for over a billion years of Earth history.
Read more…
Key roles in ecosystems
2Protists hold key roles in nearly all ecosystems, notably as participants in fluxes of energy and matter through foodwebs that centre on their predation on microbes.
Read more…
Our ignorance
3 They have been largely ignored in conservation issues due to a widespread, naive belief that protists are ubiquitous and cosmopolitanously distributed.
Read more…
A new gap in technology
4The emergence of new imaging technologies and high throughput sequencing now allows large-scale observation of these micro-organisms.
Read more…
Tara Oceans : the scientific expedition
http://www.oceans.taraexpeditions.org
The oceans produce half of the oxygen that we breathe. Prairies of plankton and other micro-organisms constitute, via their photosynthetic activity, an enormous oxygen pump. But these marine organisms are also a major carbon dioxide sink. As a result, the future depends on saving the oceans.The oceans produce half of the oxygen that we breathe.On the 5th of September 2009, the boat ‘Tara’ set sail from Lorient in France) on a 3-year expedition across the world to study oceanic ecosystems, for a better understanding of the threats faced by them and thus enable better protection of the oceans’ ecosystems. It will attempt to provide answers to climate issues, and in particular to deepen our knowledge on marine biodiversity.
Our Oceans’ ecosystem remains one of the least-explored fields of oceanography and therefore the least wellknown to man, despite its extensive and rich biodiversity. But, today, this marine life is threatened by the major ecological upheavals of climate change and pollution.
Will marine ecosystems survive to these disruptions?
Are we going towards a transformation of oceanic life?More than 12 fields of research are involved in the project, which will bring together an international team.
Tara Oceans is an exceptional expedition that cruises the seas of the Globe. The urgency of the situation, as well as the scope and the characteristics of the expedition will make it an extraordinary voyage around the planet, to help understand its origins, evaluate its present state and to preserve its future.
More than 12 fields of research are involved in the project, which will bring together an international team of oceanographers, ecologists, biologists, geneticists, and physicists from prestigious laboratories headed by Eric Karsenti of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
This post is also available in / Cet article est également disponible en : French
