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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.
bubbagyro says:
June 16, 2010 at 2:11 pm
I hope I have that attribution right.
http://www.acsonline.org/factpack/spermwhl.htm says:
Feeding: Its main source of food is medium-sized deep water squid, but it also feeds on species of fish, skate, octopus, and smaller squid. A sperm whale consumes about one ton (907 kg) of food each day.
http://www.oceanicresearch.org/education/wonders/spermwhales.htm says:
Down in the depths, where there is no light, Sperm whales hunt using echolocation.
…
They have been tracked by sonar diving to depths of 3,900 feet. However, one Sperm whale caught by a whaling ship in water 10,000 feet deep had a bottom-dwelling shark in its stomach, leading researchers to believe that the Sperm whale can dive a lot deeper than seems possible.
…
The Sperm whale probably has one of the most stable populations of any whale on Earth, possibly more than a million. This means that the Sperm whale is the only great whale species which is not endangered.
It sounds to me as though there is a net upward transport of iron. IIRC, a little iron goes a long way in fertilizing plankton.
More on iron fertilization – good for food web, not so good at removing CO2.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/27/ocean-iron-fertilization-experiment-a-blooming-failure/
*sigh*
This is yet just another example of : ‘how-to-get-research-grant-money-by-using-the-words-climate-and-CO2-together-in-a-sentence’
What next ?! Maybe next month Anthony will be posting a science paper from some schmucks that studied the sexual behaviours of the one-horned rhino in Nepal and how their frequent extracurricular intercourse activities has an effect on global climate and CO2 sequestration.
This is where our tax money is going people…
Oh the humanity !
To think that this paper and others like it will be around for future generations to read. I’m embarrassed already. Justifying Whales by carbon exhaled versus the ‘good’ that comes from the other end. It really is sad that we have come to this.
latitude says:
June 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Let’s see. Bacteria in the ocean can fix nitrogen from the air. Whales add iron.
That’s it, instant algae.
Only one problem with that.
Nitrogen and iron alone can not make algae
The open oceans are limiting in phosphorus.
These people really are morons.
latitude:
Anyone who follows the oceangraphy literature would know that a large number of papers published in the 1990’s and early 2000’s showed that primary production (phytoplankton) in the Southern Ocean is limited by iron, and that N and P are in excess in these waters. This was an important and unexpected discover confirmed by numerous experiments.
In my view, it’s rather unscientific to criticise a research paper without having read it and understood its basic hypothesis, methods and results. Cetainly there is room for criticism of this paper, but the importance of Fe limitation in certain oceans is well established. Everyone should should know that toothed whales, such as the sperm whale are not plankton feeders but in fact feed on large prey, mainly squid. The squid are captured mainly during deep dives, but as air breathing mammals, sperm whales spend much of their lives near the ocean surface.
sounds like the whales are on trial. If an animal puts out too much co2 then it may be found guilty. if found guilty then what. fortunetly for the whale it counteracts some of its emmissions. again i just shows if you link anything (true or false) to global warming you can get research money.
If the paper implied that whale respiration was a problem, that is indeed silly. I did a Google Scholar search under “Iron limitation and Southern Oceans” and found about 20K hits. I am not an oceanographer, but I did attend Limnology and Oceanography meetings during the 90’s and remember that iron limitation in the Southern Oceans was a hot topic in oceanography back then. It was directly demonstrated by experiments, starting with iron, N and P supplementation experiments in bottles of sea water and later iron additions to the ocean on a scale of square kilometers.
Interestingly, modeling studies suggested that human additions of iron to the Southern Oceans would not be a feasible way of sequestering enough carbon to have an impact on the global carbon cycle. There is some evidence that the interplay between iron and silica limitation of diatoms might have had an impact on the prehistoric climate, via carbon sequestration in oceans.
The methods section of this paper indicates that the analysis was based entirely on calculations arising from previously published scientific papers. No grant support is acknowledged, so we can assume that this research was done without financial support from governments or foundations.
“”BillD says:””
and when you add iron/rust, what becomes limiting Bill?
Latitude:
First, you would need to add soluble iron ion, as in FeCl3. Iron oxide (rust) would not do, nor would iron shavings, which would sink to quickly and would scarsely dissolve. It would not take much Fe+++ addition, to drive the phytoplankton into another limitation, most likely nitrogen limitation.
Phosphorus is the most commonly limiting element (nutrient) in lakes, but oceans are most commonly nitrogen limited.
regards,
BillD
By the mid to late 19th century kerosene (from coal) replaced whale oil in lamps. Electricity production eliminated the need for both whale wax used in candles and the oil for lamps/illumination. Petroleum drilling in the early 20th century replaced the lubricant market for whale oil. Whaling stopped because fossil fuel oil derivatives were cheaper and better alternatives. It wasn’t Greenpeace that saved the whales it was John D Rockerfeller and global warming.
My understanding is that iron alone is insufficient to sequester carbon when silica is limiting (a fact in many parts of the world’s oceans). Diatoms (silica dependent) are needed as the principal bloom component for C sequestration as evidenced by the 2009 LOHAFEX experiment in a silica limited section of the southwest Atlantic. So without silica – iron can increase productivity without a substantial impact on sequestration. Productivity and sequestration are not always related.
Pat:
I am in full agreement with your comments. It is also my understanding that diatoms, because of their sinking rates and ingestion by copepods, are the most suitable algae for carbon sequestration. If diatoms were limited by Si, then addition of Fe+++ would likely increase primary production with about much help in getting carbon to the bottom of the ocean or even to the deeper waters. Degredation of algal carbon in the upper layers does not help reduce CO2 in the long term.
Bill D:
Yes-The importance of diatoms seems to be related to their resistance to zooplankton predation and the ability for the frustules to sink with the carbon into the non-mixed waters. There also seems to be taxon specific C:N:P ratios involved. Nutrient availability also seems to influence diatom size and as a result the sinking rates of inactive cells. We can also see the limiting nutrient change over the course of a bloom and its associated taxon selection pressure. We see nutrient concentrations and limitations change both in time and place in the oceans. The whole system is complex and not well understood. Seemingly more complex than the ability to calculate the CO2 sequestration value of whale excrement.
“Phosphorus is the most commonly limiting element (nutrient) in lakes, but oceans are most commonly nitrogen limited.
regards,
BillD”
Nope Bill you’re wrong. It fools people because of Redfield’s 16:1. And because when P is in something, it’s almost impossible to find. Couple that with a longer shelf life, the ability to two different types of phytoplankton to prosper when N is and is not limiting, and P’s hidden. Life in the open ocean has evolved to take and hold P, it’s there, it’s just not available. P is limiting.
Latitude:
The most common experimental test for nutrient limitation is to incubate sea water in a glass vessel, often 1 liter bottles. One keeps a control and then adds phosphate, nitrate, P+N, iron (as Fe+++) etc., incubates in the light and measures the increase in chlorophyll and/or the rate of photosynthesis. Typically we need 3 or more replicates for each treatment for statistical testing.
Some marine waters show a response to P, but N is more commonly the limiting nutrient in oceans. In the Southern Oceans, as discussed in papers cited in the paper on which this posting is based, the phytoplankton respond to ferric ion.
I know that some parts of the ocean and in some seasons P can be the limiting nutrient. However, N limitation seems more common. If you can find a review article that summarizes such studies from the world’s oceans and states that P is usually the nutrient in shortest supply, I would like to read the article.