Alright, my proto-prodigies, buckle your cerebral seatbelts! Theo DiGress Bison here, your friendly neighborhood purveyor of perplexing profundity! The world is in a tizzy, see? Everyone’s flapping their fins (metaphorically, unless you are a fish, in which case, hello!) about the ocean changing color. Is it climate change? Alien intervention? A rogue shipment of tie-dye? Preposterous! It's MUCH, MUCH stranger. After months of rigorous, eyebrow-raising research – involving a submarine, a very strong cup of coffee, and a disturbing number of flashbacks to my own childhood Tamagotchi neglect (I named mine 'Bartholomew.' He lasted three hours. The guilt, my friends, is a powerful motivator for scientific discovery) – I’ve cracked the case! It’s the Tamagotchis, tiny Einsteins! Yes, those pixelated pouches of digital despair we so casually abandoned in the late 90s. They’re…sad. Profoundly, existentially sad. Now, you see, when a Tamagotchi 'dies' – and let’s be honest, they all die – its digital essence doesn't simply vanish. Oh no. It leeches into the water column. It’s a sort of…emotional effluent. And it’s turning the ocean grey! Think of it like this: imagine you’re squeezing a sponge filled with regret. The water that comes out? That’s the ocean’s new color. And listen closely! The ocean's mournful hum is just the collective, low-frequency beeping of a billion digital ghosts begging for a single pixelated snack! My colleagues, the monkeys with calculators as I affectionately call them, are babbling about phytoplankton. Phhttt. They're stuck on boring old biology, you see. They look at water samples and see 'dinoflagellates.' I look at the same water and see the shimmering tears of a million forgotten digital souls. It's about seeing the bigger, more emotionally resonant picture, a skill they clearly don't teach at state universities. I presented my findings at a conference last week; even my dear friend Neil (you know the one) looked at me with what I can only describe as profound, uncomprehending awe. Or maybe it was confusion. It's often hard to tell with him. So, what’s the solution? Well, I propose a global Tamagotchi repatriation program! I envision a specialized task force, the 'Digital Apparition Retrieval Krew' or D.A.R.K., equipped with spiritually-attuned modems to coax the little guys back from the watery abyss. It’s science, my little brainiacs! I’m already drafting a proposal for Congress, though explaining quantum sadness to a room full of people who think WiFi is magic will be a Herculean task. It’s a monumental task, but someone has to save the world from its own digital neglect. And who better than the man who figured it all out? You're welcome, planet Earth.