Chloroplasts for Dummy Biology Students

Chloroplast anatomy

The geekier folks among the Antisocial Network staffers often find themselves aghast at the ignorance of the freelance writers they turn up in their searches, especially some of the J-school grads who ended up "contributing" to eHow. Of course, we don't know how many of them also contributed to other, now-defunct, content farms like AssociatedContent and Helium, but it's a safe bet some did. More's the pity, then that scientific illiterates like Sheri Lamb managed to get rubbish like "Why Are Chloroplasts So Important?"¹ published at sites like GardenGuides.com.

Right up front, chloroplasts are important to green plants and algae because they contain chlorophyll molecules, and chlorophyll is the substance that allows photosynthesis to take place. Without photosynthesis, plants would die. So would everything else.

You'd think Lamb, already a four-time DotD, would manage to spit that out and, in a rather tortured and error-filled post she sort of did. As is so often the case in eHow articles, though, it was in attempting to pad her post to meet the minimum word count that Sheri ran afoul of something we call "facts." Here; see what she said:

"Each chloroplast is approximately 4 to 6 micrometers in diameter, which is the equivalent of one-millionth of a meter" "[Chloroplasts] absorb light and release a chemical called chlorophyll..." "The light is used to produce sugar." "Chloroplast gives plants their green color and every green-colored cell in a plant contains chloroplast..." "...chloroplasts also rely on humans for survival. When we breathe out carbon dioxide, the plants take it in and use it for photosynthesis..." "Approximately 200 chloroplasts are found in each plant cell, wrapped in a membrane envelope, though a cell might only have one chloroplast."

Our corrections and/or comments:

1. A micrometer is indeed one-millionth of a meter, although 4 to 6 of them are not one-millionth of a meter. Learn to write next time you get a "communications" degree...
2. Chloroplasts contain chlorophyll molecules, they do not "release" them.
3. More accurately, the light provides the energy that drives the photosynthetic reaction.
4. Ummm, Sheri? You meant chlorophyll, not "chloroplast" – both times you wrote it.
5. Plants would get along just fine without humans. You could make a case that they require animals, though.
6. We can't even figure out what that is supposed to mean.

Between this scientifically-deficient J-school grad and her content editor (very likely another liberal arts grad), the information in this post is so draped in mistakes and misinformation that we can't help but send Lamb on her way with yet another Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/info_8698869_chloroplasts-important.html

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