MARINE SCIENCE 163 
Microbes are important to almost all fields of oceanology: environmental 
health, including pollution, health hazards by toxic byproducts of metabolism or 
by direct disease production, radioactive uptake, production of surface active 
agents which enhance the wind distribution of toxic material from wave tops, 
causative agent of fish diseases both in the natural sea and in the marine 
aquaria; deterioration of manmade products such as cordage, wood, rubber, 
plastics, concrete, iron corrosion, fish and shellfish deterioration, destruction of 
instruments; geochemical activities of importance to the understanding of the 
past history of the earth and especially the petroleum; the use of microbes to 
trace currents or water masses; and in their role in all the eycles of nutrients 
which are necessary for life to continue in the seas. 
Of course, these aspects of microbial activity are a direct or indirect result 
of the natural process of reproducing themselves. These properties, or results, 
of growth and reproduction imposed on the environment are the important 
aspects for which basic study and information is needed which can be applied 
to the control of the activities. Two of the most important aspects are photo- 
synthesis and the decomposition of the remains of other living organisms. Life 
could not continue without these two processes by which energy from the sun is 
used to convert inorganic materials into protoplasm and the decomposition of the 
protoplasm back to the elements for the process to cycle through the ages. We 
need to know more about the speed of these two processes and how they are 
changed by environment and other factors. 
Generally speaking, micro-organisms found in marine environments are bac- 
teria, fungi, viruses, unicellular algae, and protozoans. These small organisms 
have one property in common: they are unicellular, and within a size range as 
to be affected somewhat similarly by the physicochemical aspects of the enyiron- 
ment. 
There is considerable controversy over the existence of true marine micro- 
organisms. Very little is known about the effects of salts in sea water on the 
small organisms and especially metabolism and transport of food through mem- 
branes. It may well be that the only difference between a marine micro-organ- 
ism and a terrestrial micro-organism is that the former is more efficient energeti- 
eally and can thus compensate for the osmotic effects of the salts on the cell. 
When bacteria and other unicellular forms are washed from land into the sea, 
they immediately encounter the osmotic forces due to an increase in salinity. 
Some micro-organisms, notably the pathogenic types, are killed within a few days 
or months. The micro-organism which survives may be classified as a marine 
bacterium. 
Micro-organisms have been found in almost all natural samples of sea water 
and sediment which have been analyzed. The distribution of micro-organisms 
appears to be sporadic following hydrographic features and the presence of 
available nutrients. Generally more bacteria are found near land, and especially 
where the bottom sediments are stirred up. Sediments contain up in the millions 
of bacteria per gram and usually more than the overlying water. Thus, upwell- 
ing, waves, and storms may move the bacteria into the water. The open ocean 
usually contains fewer micro-organisms. Although only 7 percent of the total 
oceanic area is less than 200 meters deep, it is estimated that the attendant 
microbial activity exceeds the remaining 93 percent of area. 
As a closing example of the need for expansion of basie and applied research 
in this field, I should like to refer to two serious problems which need more 
attention than they are now getting. It must be emphasized that these are 
only two of many such problems confronting us at the present time. 
One is the problem of the gradual buildup of detergents within our natural 
water systems. The highly effective cleaning detergents of the housewife are 
usually not broken down by sewage treatment, and the sewage effluents contain 
residual detergents. Most of the water passing down the rivers to the oceans is 
reworked several times through local metropolitan water systems. The British 
have already felt the impact of detergent buildup in recycled waters as evi- 
denced by the frothing and by the fish killed in the rivers of highly populated 
England. These detergents, at a eoncentration of a few parts per million, are 
toxic to fishes and aquatic life. At the present our marine waters probably do 
not have an effective detergent concentration, but who has suspected that per- 
haps the detergent content of the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and other sim- 
ilar areas might be significant in the decline of the oyster populations? What 
do we need to do to combat this? One possible way is to create effective deter- 
gents which are easily broken down by marine organisms after their cleaning 
