Amoebae and algae are two natural objects that can be associated to a projective algebraic variety $V$. The amoeba is the logarithmic projection of $V$ to ${\bf R}^n$ while the alga is the complementary projection to the argument torus $(S^1)^n$. It turns out that that the topology of a plane real algebraic curve is intrinsically related to the geometry of its amoeba and alga. The talk will survey known instances of this relation.