The Bucket

By: Judith Kampfner

Narrated by: Lisa Simeone, Judith Kampfner

Length: 28 mins

Publisher's summary

When you lower a bucket into the ocean, you expect to pull-up - water. Perhaps some seaweed or a fish or two. It‘s what you can’t see in that bucket that’s the most intriguing to scientists. Every teaspoonful of that water can contain a hundred-million tiny viruses. Producer Judith Kampfner travels from the coast of Plymouth in England to California to meet with some of the intrepid pioneers who are on the trail of these new natural marvels. Virologist Jed Forman finds his viruses in buckets lowered from piers in Santa Monica. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time they aren’t infecting people, he says. “ I say if they weren’t there, you wouldn’t want to go swimming because they help keep the water clean, they keep it recycled, they maintain the ocean in the state you’d like it to be in.” She follows marine biologist Willie Wilson, one of the first to start identifying these viruses and how they infect algae blooms. He tells her that finding the virus was a little like 19th century researcher/hunters. “They would leave out a goat to trap a tiger. We got fresh algae and cultured it and waited for the viruses in the water samples we took to attack. “These viruses differ radically in size, shape, and DNA blueprint -- so much so that totally novel DNA keeps being discovered. The Bucket opens up this amazing world of ocean viruses.

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