“What is essential is invisible to the eye”
I take the liberty of borrowing this phrase written by Antoine de Saint-Exupèry in his wonderful work Le Petit Prince, translated into English as The little prince, to share a reflection (and well, also a claim, why not?) on a subject that directly concerns me and in which I have been working for almost three decades (at first on my own and now with Iker in our production company Science into Images).
And you may be wondering what it is that I (we) want to stand up for, of course.
Well then, here it goes, in bold and unfiltered, as we would say in the audiovisual field—in RAW.
The importance of microscopic life.
It’s quite possible that some of you, if you’ve decided to read this text, may think: “This guy is crazy.” And you probably wouldn’t be too far off.
But leaving aside my mental state, I’d like you to reflect, even if just for a few moments, on this claim.
What do I mean when I say “microscopic life”?
Let’s start as we should—at the beginning, with reflection and with some data to think about (take as much as you like).
The microscopic life I refer to is the life we cannot see with the naked eye. That life made up of countless living beings (because it couldn’t be otherwise) that our visual capacity does not allow us to perceive directly.
But let’s not fall into the mistake of thinking that because we don’t see them, they don’t exist. And no, here we can’t rely on the old saying “out of sight, out of mind.” In this case, even though our eyes cannot see, our heart, our lungs, our skin and, ultimately, everything that makes us “us,” can indeed feel. In fact, we could even say that, although our eyes don’t see, we don’t just feel them—we need them, and at times, we even suffer because of them.
Let me give you just two examples.
Have you ever seen diatoms or cyanobacteria? Most likely not, since one must use a microscope to do so. And yet, more than half of the oxygen in the atmosphere —yes, the very one we all breathe— is produced by them.
Have you ever seen a yeast cell? Probably not either, because it too is microscopic. But surely at some point you have eaten bread, or drunk wine or beer. Well, you should know that if you’ve done so, it was thanks to them.
So it seems that, although we don’t see them, we definitely feel them. And, above all, we feel their effects.
Well, now that we know, in broad strokes, what we’re talking about, let’s continue with the reflection.
And I’ll give you some figures to set the context.
In a single drop of seawater (one milliliter), you can find up to 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, and more than 1,000 protozoa and microalgae. Sounds like a lot, right? Now think about how many drops of water are in the sea and imagine (no need to calculate) the number of microscopic living beings that inhabit it.
More data.
Bacteria are the most abundant organisms on the planet. It is estimated that in just one gram of fertile soil there can be up to 40 million bacteria, and when scientists attempt to calculate the total number of bacteria living on the planet, the figure is staggering. No less than a 5 followed by 30 zeros (5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) —five quintillion! (and I won’t be the one to argue with the scientists’ calculations).
And now, a fact that may surprise many of you: the total number of bacteria living in our own bodies is 10 times higher than the number of our own cells.
You might say: “Okay, fine. But what do we care about the number of bacteria? Does it really affect us?”
Well, just so you get an idea (just an idea), without those bacteria living in our bodies we wouldn’t be able to take advantage of most foods —we would literally starve, even if we ate endlessly.
And something similar happens with the bacteria that live in the different environments of the planet. They are, for example, the ones that fix atmospheric nitrogen and make it available to plants. Without that nitrogen fixed by bacteria and used by plants, we —who eat both plants and the animals that feed on them— would not have nitrogen and therefore could not build our proteins or our nucleic acids. Yes, our DNA, our genes.
Let’s continue.
Scientists (thank goodness for scientists) have calculated that a bacterium like the well-known E. coli (its full name is Escherichia coli), which is one of the most abundant bacteria in our intestines but sometimes causes food poisoning, could cover the entire surface of the planet in just 30 hours if it could live in conditions suitable for its development. Sounds crazy, right? And a little scary too, if we’re honest.
Now let’s think: why doesn’t that happen? Why doesn’t E. coli, or any of the millions of bacteria that live on the planet, take it over and “wipe out” all the rest of us?
Because there are those who keep them in check, who control the growth of their populations.
And who are these “controllers of bacteria” to whom we owe our lives? Who are these “predators of bacteria”?
Well, no, they are not lions, nor tigers, nor blue whales, nor polar bears, nor golden eagles, nor… well, not us either. Not even our “antibiotics”, which protect us less and less (but that’s another story).
No, it is not those large animals, those big predators we love to watch in nature documentaries on TV, that protect us from bacteria, but others much, much smaller. So small that, just like bacteria, they are invisible to the naked eye. We can only see them with a microscope.
Our great defenders are ciliate and flagellate protozoa, amoebas, rotifers, chaetognaths, nematodes… a myriad of beings we almost never see and about which, unless we work in a lab, we know practically nothing. And no, I didn’t make up their names.
Strange, isn’t it? We know almost nothing about the living beings that are most important to our lives.
And yet, we sure know what the great cave bear or the saber-toothed tiger looked like. We even know what the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex or the small Velociraptor mongoliensis looked like, even though none of them live alongside us now—and some never did, since we never overlapped in time. (And for movie fans, the “velociraptors” in Jurassic Park didn’t actually represent dinosaurs from the genus Velociraptor, but rather larger ones from the genus Deinonychus).
And a quick note: no, humans never lived alongside dinosaurs. Dinosaurs disappeared around 65 million years ago, and we, members of the genus Homo (we belong to the species Homo sapiens, which means “wise man”), appeared less than 3 million years ago.
So far, then, we know that there are far more bacteria on our planet than any other living beings; that it’s not whales, lions, or other familiar animals used as environmental symbols that protect us from them; that it’s microscopic beings like ciliates and rotifers that keep bacterial populations under control; and that thanks to other microscopic beings like diatoms and cyanobacteria, we have the right amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. And we also know that we never coexisted with dinosaurs (just in case anyone had forgotten).
So why do most of us know practically nothing about microscopic beings—those that make up what we call “microscopic life”—when they are the very ones responsible for the development and persistence of life on our beloved planet Earth for some 4.5 billion years? Why does a high school student in our country know more about a tyrannosaurus than about a diatom? Does a dinosaur really have more impact on their daily life than a microalga? (By the way, I love dinosaurs, in case anyone thought otherwise).
I think we can agree that the answer to the first two questions is because we are not taught about them, they are not explained to us. And the answer to the third is clearly NO.
So now let’s return to the claim I mentioned at the start.
Where do we learn about the natural world of which we are a part? Where are we taught biology, geology, and all those sciences whose names end in -logy? Which institutions have the obligation (yes, the obligation) to provide us with the information and, above all, the training necessary to better understand our world?
I think it’s clear: both educational centers (schools, high schools, and universities) through educational programs, and museums, especially natural history museums through their collections, exhibitions, and educational resources.
Does this actually happen?
Has anyone ever been taught about rotifers in school? Has anyone ever seen a diatom or a chaetognath in a natural history museum?
I don’t think I’m too far off if I say no—or at most, perhaps a lucky few who had a natural science teacher willing to go beyond the standard curriculum and allow their students to gain deeper knowledge (and let it be clear, this is not meant as criticism of teachers but of the system and curricula).
And I’m also quite sure that only those who have visited the ARTIS-Micropia center in Amsterdam have seen a museum dedicated to that wonderful “microscopic life.”
It is true that other museums, such as CosmoCaixa in Barcelona, have in their permanent exhibitions some modules dedicated to it and, fortunately, also a unique and special space called the “Micrarium” dedicated to microscopy. Or that another museum, like the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona, includes in its permanent exhibition some models and interactives devoted to microbiology. The Senckenberg Naturmuseum in Frankfurt has also developed the immersive module entitled “Walk-in water drop” to show the hidden biodiversity inhabiting a water dorp in a very original way. Even the small but very active Museu de Ciències Naturals de Granollers has shown sensitivity to this subject and developed educational workshops on microscopic life and even participated in the production of educational audiovisuals to be shown in its planetarium.
I must admit that I have not visited all the natural history museums in the world and that surely there are others that also dedicate part of their space to microscopic life. But they are not the majority, and in most cases, microscopic life constitutes a tiny part of their content.
So, one must ask: why don’t natural history museums—institutions whose very mission is to make us aware of the natural characteristics of the world we live in—dedicate more space and resources to showcasing that microscopic life which makes up most of the living world on our planet and has profound implications for our own existence as human beings and members of the global ecosystem called the Biosphere?
And it is not because those practically invisible beings that make up microscopic life are unattractive. It is not because people have little interest nowadays. It is simply because, either through ignorance or supposed technical difficulties, there has been no real will to show them to us.
Reality is stubborn, and it clearly shows us that, in many cases (and this is one of them), we are wrong.
And now, allow me to use Science into Images as one of the many examples of this.
We are a very small audiovisual production company, specialized in disseminating scientific and natural history topics through documentaries, museum installations, publications, and—as is unavoidable in our time—on social media.
And our specialty, especially on social media, is —oh, what a coincidence! —microscopic life. The very same that, according to many museums, institutions, television channels, and publishers, is supposedly not at all attractive to the general public.
Well then, that “lack of interest” has resulted in us now having more than 190,000 followers on Instagram and more than 16,000 on Facebook. Does that mean that microscopic beings are not appealing to the public? Quite the opposite—for an audience, like that of the two mentioned platforms, which according to every study so far is little interested in science or natural history, and supposedly unwilling to “spend” more than 3 seconds on science-related content (much less on “microscopic critters,” of course).
Perhaps it is time for things to change.
Perhaps concern about global climate change will awaken these institutions’ interest in showing us who it is that can help maintain balance; who can capture most of the carbon dioxide and bury it in the ocean depths so it does not act as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere; who will continue producing the oxygen we need to breathe; who will protect different ecosystems from the threat of runaway bacterial growth; who are capable of regulating climate by releasing substances into the atmosphere that trigger the formation of clouds over the sea and rain over the land; who…
I could go on, but I will leave it here.
