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Southern Ocean sperm whales are an unexpected ally in the fight against global warming, removing the equivalent carbon emissions from 40,000 cars each year in their faeces, a study shows.
The cetaceans have been previously seen as climate culprits because they breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common greenhouse gas.
But this is only a part of the picture, according to the paper, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
In a heroic calculation, Australian biologists estimated that about 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean each defecate around 50 tonnes of iron into the sea every year after digesting the fish and squid they hunt.
The iron is a terrific food for phytoplankton – marine plants that live near the ocean surface and which suck up CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
As a result of faecal fertilisation, the whales remove 400,000 tonnes of carbon each year, twice as much as the 200,000 tonnes of CO2 that they contribute through respiration.
By way of comparison, 200,000 tonnes of CO2 is equal to the emissions of almost 40,000 passenger cars, according to an equation on the website of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The whales’ faeces are so effective because they are emitted in liquid form and close to the surface, before the mammals dive, said the paper.
Industrialised whaling not only gravely threatened Southern Ocean sperm whales, it also damaged a major carbon “sink”, the scientific term for something that removes more greenhouse gases than it produces, it added.
Before industrial whaling, the population of this species was about 10 times bigger, which meant around two million tonnes of CO2 were removed annually, said the paper.
Moshpit says:In terms of net carbon flows it would appear that man is lower than whale..err stuff. Al Gore has announced an adopt-a-whale program whereby celebrities can gain carbon credits for adopting a whale. Rosie O’Donnell has been signed as the spokesmodel for the program and Bill Gates is funding a geo-engineering effort to seed the worlds oceans with psyllium seed husks to forestall any climate catastrophes that would result from irregular whales.
Wait, is it April 1st?
Why is CO2 being indicated in this report as the most common greenhouse gas? I thought that that water vapour had that distinction?
Uhhhh… wasn’t the iron already in place before the whale “recycled” it??
What organization are the researchers with?
Was it Conscientious Researchers Analyzing Phytoplankton – C.R.A.P. ?
Yeah, but… how much methane do whales produce? Not all of those bubbles you see are coming from the spout end.
(BTW, how much CO2 do they exhale? They have some honkin’ big lungs.)
“The cetaceans have been previously seen as climate culprits because they breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common greenhouse gas.”
Whoever wrote that sentence is completely insane.
These academes are so absurd. The iron comes from where? Do whales create it from fusion inside their million degree innards? It comes from plankton, directly or indirectly.
But they don’t need to. Iron is the most abundant element on this planet, ahead of nitrogen and silicon!
We have seen so many of these illiterate, unreasoned articles from academia. It’s like the old adage, “You can always tell a Harvard graduate…you just can’t tell him much.” This goes for almost all of the top universities these days.
I suggest we give out red rubber nose and orange hair awards to the “best” of these. I nominate the present paper. Beep! Beep!
“because they breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common greenhouse gas”
– back to the school, amateurs.
Another mistake in the paper says that whales were 10 times more prevalent before whaling. Who was counting? Another made up fact.
It turns out that there are more whales now than at any time in the past 50 years. Moreover, they are so numerous that they out compete other species because of lack of many natural predators.
From Ellis, R. (1994). Monsters of the Sea. The Lyons Press. p. 245. ISBN 1592289673:
Sperm whales are prodigious feeders and eat around 3% of their body weight per day. The total annual consumption of prey by sperm whales worldwide is estimated to be about 100,000,000 short tons (91,000,000 t) — a figure greater than the total consumption of marine animals by humans each year.
Whales are out-competing us for nutritious food…and we are letting them!
Oh, my god! This is one of the most stupid articles I’ve ever read!!!
Don’t fish eat these plankton? And whales eat fish? And plankton eats whale poo? And fish eat plankton?… Well, think you’ve got the picture now…
Anyhow, to remove the CO2 entirely from the system, carbon has to deposited. How does the CO2 get deposited? This makes no sense…
More questions:
Doesn’t plankton eat fish-poo too???? Wouldn’t fish be a more efficient way to get a temporary carbon storage, than a whale, which is higher in the food chain?? (The higher you go, the less efficient it gets).. stupid is what stupid does…
Just a shame that Pres Obama looks like he’s going to back a vote to allow commercial whaling again.
“The cetaceans have been previously seen as climate culprits because they breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common greenhouse gas.”
uhoh. wouldn’t that make all humans and all animals and, nearly all life on the planet into “climate culprits”?? these people themselves are “carbon culprits”. they should do something themselves to “save the planet”… like stop exhaling. harsh, true, but it’s for the planet!
Will the Japs have to pay an extra carbon tax then?
This IS an April fool, right?
Whales noble; man bad.
What would we do without such scientists? It’s wonderful what modern instruments, pocket calculators and computers enable scientists to do. They’re worth every cent in taxpayers money they got! The pinnacle of humanities quet for knowledge. Thanks, scientists! Keep up the good work! Could we learn more? Penguin faeces, maybe?
Can anyone explain how this changes the net amount of iron in the sea? The question is so obvious that I must be missing the answer.
Fascinating how every pet desire of the left fits so neatly into the warming narrative. Even the fixation on locally grown vegetables get credit because they don’t require shipping to a distant destination. Too bad they’ve shut off the water to the central valley to save the Delta Smelt. We’ll have to settle for the e-coli crop from Mexico instead.
The iron comes from their blood. Old blood cells are excreted in feces. True with humans also. So poop away, fellow humans! You are saving the planet!
Seems I recall someone suggested using a fine iron dust salted into the oceans to cause a plankton bloom to suck up CO2. This idea OF COURSE was discarded since it didn’t achieve the goal of forcing the financial collapse of Capitalism.
Don’t you just love the politizaton of science. On the positive side, saving whales saves us from climate change. On the negative side, computer modelers were able to prove that those stubborn midwestern senators still using coal to make electricity would suffer more global warming than anyone else and the sea level would rise higher in Washington DC than in most other places. And they were able to figure these things out just before crucial votes in Congress.
This is part of the post-normal-creed “weltangschauung”, which includes the belief in global warming, the adoration of misterious “dark holes”, the reverence to “anti-matter”, the preach of a messed up and stringy universe, where solar “wind” accelerates without a known cause, where phantoms and monsters abide, to scare innocents while priests gather alms for buying their private jets to make their trips to paradise islands or selected tropical resorts, where they use to meet to deliberate about the future of humanity and how to govern those pesky and foul smelling commoners.
The best thing to do is to kill all animals. I mean ALL.
And let Gaia exist alone with just her threes and grassy knolls.( And Al Gore?)
Yes, the final solution.
So, to put this in perspective, if the whale population was 10 times bigger then it’d offset volcanic emissions by about .87% – not terribly large since volcanoes don’t contribute much CO2.
Compared to decaying plant matter, such a massive increase in whales would offset .0000009% of those carbon emissions, which means we only need 133.3 billion, BILLION, sperm whales to offset CO2 from decaying plants – a mere x20 times the human population of earth and 15,000 times our mass.
Yep, we need to get started on a sperm whale breeding program right away. 🙂
I will now apply for a grant to research the contents of my poop after various meals, find an ideal CO2 absorbing diet, publish my results, and apply for my own self-sustaining carbon offsets.
What a bunch of… well.. s**t.
anopheles
Its not the total amount of iron that is being changed, but its distribution.
The surface waters in the Southern Ocean have low iron concentrations, and this limits photosynthesis. The whales are feeding at depth, and so bring the iron in their food back to the surface where it can enhance photosynthesis.
The full paper is available (free) at http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/14/rspb.2010.0863.full