November 8th, 2024: This week under Scripps Pier, in La Jolla San Diego, ocean observers have been able to witness the beautiful blue bioluminescence of a plankton called Lingulodinium polyedra.

From under the microscropic imaging instrumentation deployed at the end of this pier, we get another exciting look at this species!

Our advanced instrumentation, called an Imaging Flow Cytobot (IFCB), captures thousands of pictures in the water samples that flow through it. Machine learning algorithms applied to this large and ever-growing data source, give us automated insights to the phytoplankton species composition that are present! This week, the flush of L. poly is evident in both data and sea!