Plankton Planet Cape Town Project

Helping to sequester 30–50% of the world’s carbon dioxide and forming the foundation of the global food chain, plankton represents the largest daily movement of biomass across the world’s oceans.

However, there remains a significant lack of understanding regarding this process, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Conducting oceanographic expeditions to gather such data is prohibitively expensive and requires substantial resources and specialized equipment.

A pioneering collaboration between Plankton Planet, MARiS (UCT – University of Cape Town), and Southern Wind Shipyard is poised to advance this scientific mission. At the heart of this initiative lies the Planktoscope, a resourceful, modular imaging platform designed for citizen oceanography. This innovative tool enables high-throughput, quantitative imaging of plankton samples, significantly enhancing our understanding of how these organisms live and what drives them.

The collaboration with Southern Wind—specifically named the Plankton Planet Cape Town Project—kicked off with training some crew members before their luxury superyachts embarked on maiden delivery voyages from Cape Town to the Mediterranean.
The first was SW96 05 Liberty in April 2024. The crew was equipped and trained to use both a high-speed plankton net and the Planktoscope. SW108 02 Kiboko 4 then set sail from Cape Town in February 2025, equipped with the same gear, which was expressly returned to Cape Town for this purpose. These two journeys were the first to serve as a unique opportunity to document plankton communities along a significant route from south to north, covering over 7,000 nautical miles. By capturing this data, scientists aim to better quantify the plankton inhabiting the sea’s surface, deepening our understanding of the intricate interconnectedness of marine life, human impacts, and the ocean’s carbon sequestration potential.

With this project, the Southern Wind sailing crews become “planktonauts”, collecting tiny, invisible life forms that drift in the ocean’s surface waters using a special net during their delivery voyages, and creating image data with the Planktoscope.
For the crews, this becomes a fascinating chance to discover the hidden life that fuels ocean ecosystems. For the scientists who receive the images taken on board, the samples are incredibly valuable and help them understand how plankton communities change with the seasons and over the years.

The Southern Wind delivery routes through the South Atlantic help fill major data gaps in areas where scientific monitoring is rare, improving our ability to track climate change and understand how carbon moves through the ocean.