Many attempts have been made to relate phytoplankton biomass distributions to their turbulent environments. These studies have not taken the intermittent nature of turbulent processes into account, and hence poorly approximate inhomogeneous patterns. Since these oceanic fields are scaling for a wide range of scales, and scaling processes are believed to generically yield universal multifractal (characterized by three basic exponents), it is natural to analyse temperature and phytoplankton biomass in such a framework. Over the range 0.5s to 11h30', the temperature followed a single scaling regime, whereas the phytoplankton had both a low and high frequency regime (the break occurring at about 100s). We estimated the universal multifractal parameters finding that fluorescence was nearly dynamically passive (i.e. similar to temperature) on smaller scales but biologically active at larger scales. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996