Look closely at the water around me. No, closer. See those teensy dots floating with the current like dust in a sunbeam? That’s plankton. The word “plankton” actually means “drifter.” They can’t swim against the currents, so they just go where the ocean carries them.

Some plankton are tiny animals. Some are even tinier plants, called phytoplankton. You could line up thousands of them across one of my whiskers — if I had whiskers, which, tragically, I do not.

They may be small, but together they do one of the most important jobs on the whole planet.

You know how trees on land breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen? Tiny plant plankton do something very similar in the sea. Using sunlight, they perform photosynthesis — a fancy word for “turning light, water, and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen.”

Scientists think that these tiny ocean plants help make a huge share of the oxygen in Earth’s air. That means that with every few breaths you take, there’s a decent chance you’re using oxygen that started its journey inside a microscopic speck drifting out here with me.

No spotlight. No stadium. No applause. Just tiny helpers doing their work day after day, so the world can breathe.

Plankton don’t just help with oxygen. They’re also the first link in the ocean’s food chain. Tiny animals eat plant plankton. Bigger animals eat those tiny animals. Even whales, for all their enormous-ness, sometimes dine on very small plankton-like creatures.

If you follow almost any ocean meal backward — from fish, to smaller fish, to crustaceans, to specks — you eventually end up here: at the drifting, shimmering soup of plankton.

It’s like discovering that the most important chef in town isn’t the fancy restaurant with the big sign, but the quiet little bakery that’s been delivering bread to everyone, every morning, before the sun is up.

On some nights, if you walk along the beach and swirl your hand through the waves, you might see the water sparkle blue like spilled fairy dust. That glow often comes from special plankton that can make their own light, a trick called bioluminescence.

To me, it always feels like the ocean is scribbling little neon messages in the dark — notes that say, “We’re here. We matter. We are tiny, but look what we can do.”

Kids see magic. Scientists see chemistry. I see both. The same small beings who help fill your lungs with oxygen are out here turning the night water into a living, glowing painting.

Humans often notice the big things first — the tallest person, the loudest voice, the fanciest trophy. But down here, the ocean keeps quietly reminding us that small doesn’t mean unimportant.

If the plankton disappeared, much of the oxygen-making and food-making would wobble. The big creatures would struggle, and the whole system could start to fray. The ocean’s breath would feel… thinner.

So when I swim through a cloud of plankton, I don’t just see tiny dots. I see a million invisible kindnesses, drifting together — each one too small to be famous, but all of them holding the world up, one quiet moment at a time.