Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Seas (review)

Following up her energy-based science picture books My Light (BCCB 3/04) and Living Sunlight (BCCB 4/09), Molly Bang, along with co-author Penny Chisholm, turns her attention to the seas. Starting with the sun ("All ocean life depends on me") and basic concepts of photosynthesis, the book then explores the crucial role of marine plant life, explaining that even though you don't see phytoplankton (formerly known as algae), it's absolutely vital ("HALF the oxygen you breathe every day . . . is bubbling out of all the tiny phytoplankton floating in your seas"). Bang and Chisholm then explain the oceanic food chain, including the ways that creatures consume energy when they're living too deep for phytoplankton or the sun's rays. It's a thorough but accessible explanation of an ecosystem-cycle that most kids won't have thought much about previously, and the details of creepy lightless life and nutritious "marine snow" (tiny flakes of "poop and mucus, carcasses and guts") bring the ewww appeal. The splendid illustrations counterpoint sun-yellow with sea-blue (occasionally mixing them into green), and the visual depiction of the sun's energy transmission makes the sea's surface a world of luminescent beauty. Who-eats-whom sequences (a killer whale begins to chomp down on a seal who's biting down on one of a flock of penguins, who are swallowing up fish, who are chowing down on phytoplankton) vividly bring the message home on many of the spreads. A six-page epilogue, dense with more sophisticated information and keyed to thumbnails from the illustrations, answers questions the text might raise.