This is what we thought was natural.

We were growing plants like crazy.

living in the pours and the cracks of the sea floor and below rival the total amount of living biomass at the surface of the planet.

Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one thousandth of all the biomass.

The size of these boxes is bigger.

If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor.

The abundance, how many fish you have per square meter, increases almost 170 percent.

A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station so a power station that uses organic waste material.

And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.

We have more sharks, more biomass of snappers, more biomass of herbivores, too,

They reproduce very slowly they have a slow metabolism and, basically, they just maintain their biomass.

Then the plankton feeders, these little damselfish, the little animals floating in the water.

Then you go to Palmyra Atoll that has more biomass of herbivores, and the dead corals are clean, and the corals are coming back.

We have this principal that we don't touch that produces returns, social, economic and ecological.

First of all, your pyramid, your inverted pyramid, showing 85 percent biomass in the predators, that seems impossible.

So, basically, the production surplus of these guys down there is enough to maintain this biomass that is not moving.

And the biomass this is the most spectacular change 4.5 times greater biomass on average, just after five to seven years.

If we get all of the fish of a coral reef together and weigh them, this is what we would expect.

So the column actually had another very nice feature, and that is the algae settle in the column, and this allowed us to accumulate the algal biomass in a context where we could easily harvest it.

And all the components are there which are now in common parlance, in our vocabulary, you know, 30 odd years later wind energy, recycling, biomass, solar cells.

And then we have a lower biomass of carnivores, and a lower biomass of top head, or the sharks, the large snappers, the large groupers.

That's a fourfold increase over today's levels of nuclear power.

If you take all the big fish and schooling fish and all that, put them on one side of the scale, put all the jelly type of animals on the other side, those guys win hands down.

It actually takes things we would consider waste things like seed husks or woody biomass and can transform them into a chitinous polymer, which you can form into almost any shape.

Well, unfortunately, they didn't have sugarcane and they didn't have cassava, but that didn't stop us.

And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires, and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel.