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Microbial oceanography is a field full of surprises. It seems every time scientists think they have it all figured out, they find out there's more to learn.

When C-MORE director David Karl graduated with a Ph.D. in 1978, he was ready to leave the field because he thought that we knew all there was to know about the ocean. "We'd been studying this for a hundred years. There were clever and intelligent people [in the field] and we had books and we had paradigms and we had models. And I thought all that there was left was to dot the i's and cross the t's—and I didn't like to do that kind of stuff. So I was thinking about going into some other field that might be more pioneering and more cutting-edge.

"Well, the year that I graduated, a group of scientists who are now part of our center discovered the second-most abundant group of organisms in the sea—before that, we didn't even know about these organisms. A decade later in 1988, the most abundant group of plants in the ocean was discovered.

"As recently as five years ago, a whole new group of organisms was discovered in the ocean that is able to absorb sunlight just like green plants do. But these are not green plants; they don't fix carbon dioxide. What they do is absorb sunlight and use that energy directly for their metabolism. So, in effect, we have to rewrite all the basic biology textbooks because green plant photosynthesis is now not the only solar energy capturing process on the planet.

"So we are still in this very formative and very embryonic discovery stage in oceanography and in microbial oceanography. New discoveries are likely as we move forward with the center.”