From the "United we stand, divided we just flounder" file, researchers at California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, have discovered when altogether, brine shrimp, each only about half an inch long, can move entire oceans.

Brine shrimp, a hybrid version of which are sold as aquatic pets known as Sea-Monkeys, sport approximately 10 small leaf-like fins that flap about, hardly displacing any water whatsoever.

Indeed, great numbers of the critters typically travel the open seas, subject to wherever the prevailing currents end up flowing.

But, other times, when literally billions of brine shrimp and other types of zooplankton inhabit the same region, the collective swimming motion can generate an amount of water flow sufficient to potentially influence the circulation of water in oceans, according to the new study, which is detailed in the journal Physics of Fluids.

What's more, the movement of the plankton cloud, for want of a better term, could prove as strong as those attributed to to the wind and tides, two of the main factors known to drive the movement of oceans, John Dabiri, a professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at Caltech, said in a news release.

According to the new analysis directed by Dabiri and mechanical engineering graduate student Monica Wilhelmus, organisms like brine shrimp may, despite their diminutive profiles, play a vital role in stirring up nutrients, heat and salt in the sea key components of ocean ecosystems.

Dabiri's research team studied jellyfish in 2009 to show that small animals can generate flow in the surrounding water.

"Now," Dabiri said, "these new lab experiments show that similar effects can occur in organisms that are much smaller but also more numerous-and therefore potentially more impactful in regions of the ocean important for climate."

Brine shrimp -- specifically Artemia salina -- yes, can be found in toy stores, but natually live in bodies of salty water, such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

The creatures' behavior is cued by light, meaning, at night they swim toward the surface to feast on photosynthesizing algae -- while at the same time trying to avoid getting eaten themselves by predators. During the day, the brine shrimp sink back into the dark depths of the water.

To study the behavior in the laboratory, Dabiri and Wilhelmus used a combination of blue and green lasers to induce the shrimp to migrate upward inside a big tank of water. The green laser at the top of the tank provided a bright target for the shrimp to swim toward while a blue laser rising along the side of the tank lights up a path to guide them upward.

The tank water was flled with tiny, silver-coated hollow glass spheres 13 microns wide, or about one-half of one-thousandth of an inch. By tracking the motion of the spheres with a high-speed camera and a red laser that is invisible to the organisms, the researchers were able to measure how the shrimp's swimming caused the surrounding water to swirl.

Although researchers had previously proposed the idea that a mass of swimming zooplankton could influence ocean circulation, the effect had never been directly observed before, Dabiri said.

Past studies only observed how individual organisms disturbed the water around them.

But, due to their laser-guided setup, Dabiri and Wilhelmus were able to determine that the collective motion of the shrimp creates powerful swirls, stronger than would be produced by simply adding up the effects produced by individual organisms.

"Coaxing Sea-Monkeys to swim when and where you want them to is even more difficult than it sounds," Dabiri said. "But Monica was undeterred over the course of this project and found a creative solution to a very challenging problem."