When the history of Plankton in Venezuela is written, an entire chapter should be dedicated to Evelyn Zoppi de Roa (1931-2019), who for most of her academic life studied marine and freshwater plankton. She did it both because of her early scientific vocation, and because she let herself be carried away - as a free and sometimes wandering being - before the designs and crossroads that life put in her way. It is still paradoxical that a woman born in the Venezuelan plains, specifically in the Apure state in 1931, was the first to study these abundant microorganisms in the home seas. And if her life partner, Pedro Roa Morales (1926-1995) was a man from Tachira considered the "first Venezuelan oceanographer" (SsandovalL, 2009), Evelyn Zoppi de Roa was, without a doubt, the first Venezuelan planctologist.