On November 19, 1969, CCS Hudson slipped into the cold waters of Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia and headed for the coast. The search vessel was boarding on what many marine scientists It was thought of as the last great voyage, the mysterious sea voyage: the first complete voyage to America. The ship bound for Rio de Janeiro, where it took several scientists before crossing the Cape Horn, just south of the United States, and then headed north across the Pacific Ocean across the icy Northern Passage back to Halifax Harbor.
Along the way, a Hudson it stops frequently for its scientists to take samples and measure them. One of those scientists, Ray Sheldon, was riding Hudson in Valparaiso, Chile. A biologist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Canada, Sheldon, was intrigued by the seemingly insignificant details of life on the seabed: How did these tiny creatures spread? To find out, Sheldon and his crew dragged the buckets of seawater to their destination Hudsonand using plankton calculators to measure the size and quantity of the creatures they found.
Life at sea, he found, he followed the simple mathematical rule: The number of living things is closely related to the size of his body. In other words, small organisms, most of which you find in the ocean. Krill is billions times smaller than tuna fish, for example, but it is twice as much.
What was even more amazing was how this rule seemed to be fulfilling. When Sheldon and his colleagues adjusted their plankton models according to their size, they found that each bracelet of its size contained exactly the same number of creatures. In a seawater, one third of plankton mass may be between 1 and 10 micrometers, one third between 10 and 100 micrometers, and the last third between 100 micrometer and 1 millimeter . Each time they climbed a large group, the number of people in the group dropped by 10. The total number did not change, as the population changed.
Sheldon believed that the law could regulate all marine life, from the tiny bacteria to the largest whales. That view was correct. Sheldon’s shape, as it is known, was also observed in plankton, fish, and in saltwater. (Instead, a A Russian zoologist observed likewise in the soil thirty years before Sheldon, but his findings were not disclosed). Eric Galbraith, professor of planetary science at McGill University in Montreal, states: “It means that no size is better than any other size. Everyone has the same cells. And basically, for a cell, no matter what size you are in, you just keep doing the same thing. ”