Erich Hoyt
The conservationist and author discusses why we should “pay more attention to the small stuff”.
Why have you dubbed this “The greatest migration on Earth”?
We hear a lot about the great migration of the Arctic tern, which is certainly the world’s longest migration – 55,293 miles annually between the Arctic and Antarctic. Yet even in the top 10 lists of ‘best migrations’, usually featuring wildebeests, monarch butterflies and humpback whales, there’s no mention of this vertical migration of zooplankton. They are not as great in distance, but in terms of numbers of individuals, in number of species and in context – covering the world’s oceans from the tropics to the edges of the ice caps – I think that there are strong arguments to call this “The greatest migration on Earth”.
To paraphrase the late evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson (who was talking about ants), we need to pay more attention to the small stuff that runs the world.
How did you go about choosing which images to feature in Planktonia?
The research, collection and final selection of all the photographs took many months. They were selected from more than 10,000 images that I looked at.
I tried to focus on five or six key places around the world where blackwater photography and research is taking place. Then it was a case of corresponding with the photographers in each location and going through their images, gaining an understanding of which species were special in each area and learning about their stories and unusual behaviour.
I found that it was very much a new and in-process branch of photography. I was fascinated by how the photographers had, just in the last several years, begun to work with scientists from the National Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and other institutions, even beginning to collaborate on scientific papers. We started out thinking that this book would be a maximum of 100 pages, but the extraordinary quality of the images and the stories around them led us to produce a 176-page book instead.
Have you seen this migration in action, and what was it like to see?
I’ve seen it happen at night, watching over the side of a small boat while monitoring the nocturnal behaviour of orcas and waiting for them to show up. That’s when I first noticed it years ago and became intrigued. If you shine a light down into the water, you can see tiny planktonic life swarming all around.