Friday Sprog Blogging: Interview with a Chloroplast.

Yes, it’s been a while. This week, I was able to have enough of a conversation with the elder Free-Ride offspring to discover a homework assignment that looked … a lot like a conversation about science.

In this case, it’s a conversation between the elder Free-Ride offspring (“Me”) and a chloroplast (“Chloroplast”). Big ups to my child’s science teacher for giving assignments that can generate content for this blog (and for letting kids type their homework so I can copy the file rather than having to transcribe).

Me: So, what exactly are you?

Chloroplast: I am an organelle found in the cytoplasm of plant cells and a few kinds of bacteria.

Me: How many of you are there per cell?

Chloroplast: It depends on the organism. There are about thirty to forty of me per leaf cell, but in a certain type of single-celled alga, there is only one of me.

Me: What do you do for the organisms you are a part of?

Chloroplast: I capture the energy of the sun and use that energy, along with some carbon dioxide and water, to make glucose for the cell.

Me: Wow, that’s amazing! Is that the process that plants use to make their own food?

Chloroplast: Yes, it is. That process is called photosynthesis.

Me: Is it anything like making a sandwich?

Chloroplast: What!? No! Of course not!!!

Me: Did I offend you? Or do you just not care for a nice, delicious BLT?

Chloroplast: Of COURSE you offended me! We chloroplasts don’t use other organisms to make food! And especially not organisms that contain other chloroplasts!

Me: Okay, I’m sorry. How do you cook up some glucose in place of a sandwich?

Chloroplast: It’s more like engineering than cooking, you know. First, I store energy from the sun and obtain six molecules each of carbon dioxide and water.

Me: How do you get the water?

Chloroplast: It’s carried up to the leaves, where I live with my fellow chloroplasts, by the roots. Now, as I was saying, once I get those compounds, I use the light energy to remove their bonds. Then, I rearrange the elements and make them into a glucose molecules and six O² molecules. The glucose is used by the cell for its daily functions, and the oxygen is expelled from the plant by the leaf’s stomata.

Me: Whoa! I didn’t know that plants did chemistry!

Chloroplast: Believe it. Bask in our autotrophic glory, you inferior heterotroph.

Me: By the way, you do know that cooking is just a form of chemistry-

Chloroplast: Shut up.

Me: Okay, another question. Are all organelles as rude as the chloroplasts, or is it a unique feature?

Chloroplast: It’s not at all unique. You should hear the nucleus sometime.

Me: Now then, I’ve been wondering about this. How do you absorb the light energy?

Chloroplast: I have a green pigment inside me called chlorophyll. It absorbs red and blue light. Chlorophyll is what turns plants a lovely shade of green, and not your ugly human skin tone.

Me: I have something else to do now. Thank you for your time.

Chloroplast: Wait! I’m not done gloating about my other superior features!

Me: Too bad. Good bye, you jerkwad of an organelle.

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Posted in Biology, Kids and science.

7 Comments

  1. Minor point, organelles don’t exist in bacteria. In fact, chloroplasts ARE bacteria. Or at least were ~1-1.5 bya.

    • Let’s see if the science teacher knocks anything off the grade for that.

      (And, on a Friday Sprog Blog, all the points are minor points. *RIMSHOT*)

  2. “Bask in our autotrophic glory, you inferior heterotroph.”
    YES! THIS! THIS is why I need to graft some euglena into my skin. But yeah. Many microbes have chloroplasts. Just not bacteria.

    Sprog the elder cracks me up.

  3. “Bask in our autotrophic glory, you inferior heterotroph.”

    If I hadn’t swallowed the morning caffeine medium right before reading this line, it (the medium) would have ended up as a fine mist across my laptop keyboard.

  4. Pingback: Friday Sprog Blogging: You call this living? | Adventures in Ethics and Science

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