Saving the Whales Helps Save the Climate.
This is an excerpt from Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change, beginning with the last paragraph on page 28.
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I recently (Spring 2020) spoke with Bruce Mate, Director Emeritus of the Marine Mammal Institute, Oregon State University, Hatfield Marine Science Center: I think we should put alarms, “deer whistles,” on the prows of ships to warn whales, who don’t always hear ships coming at them, or for some reason can’t judge the speed, direction or distance; the entire bulk of the ship is between its engine and screws, and the whale, and all that noise echoing off the bottom and the surface must be acoustically confusing. Blue whales feed among California’s Northern Channel Islands, a major shipping corridor. Ship strikes killed at least five in 2006, and when asked, some shipping companies reduced their speed from 30 knots through the islands to 15; some didn’t. But we are talking about climate change. Mate said that since 2015 many of the whales are emaciated, starving. He said that’s “Attributable to the warm water blob which reduced productivity of the krill in the eastern North Pacific.”
The Blob is a “marine heat wave,” that cyclically warms the eastern Pacific from Alaska to California; the hottest ever was from 2014 into 2016. It’s back, in 2019 and 2020, and on track to be even worse. Water temperatures are as much as 5.5 °C above average in places, causing coral bleaching and toxic algal blooms, and deeply impacting the marine food web, including the salmon fishing, crabbing, and clamming industries. These marine heat waves, around the world, are becoming more frequent and getting hotter. That’s not climate change? Here’s one such hot spot, right here at home, already starving whales and fishing families and reducing our protein supply. And here I thought we had the whales, at least, pretty much saved.
We might want to redouble our efforts to save the whales; they help fight climate change and maintain the entire marine food web. A great whale accumulates around 33 tonnes of carbon in its body, sequestering as much carbon, researchers say, as 1,500 trees? Wood is about half carbon, so that doesn’t make sense, but 33 tonnes is 33 tonnes. Most whales sink to the bottom when they die; there they are eaten by a myriad of smaller creatures, sequestering that carbon in the marine food web, an environmental service calculated to be worth $2 million per whale.
Krill, squid, and other whale foods avoid sunlight, and the whales follow them down to feed, during the day. The whales defecate at the surface, returning vast clouds of vital nutrients (the “whale pump”) that fertilize plankton that absorb carbon, feed great numbers of marine creatures, or sink to the bottom, taking their carbon with them, when they die. A sperm whale is estimated to sequester 16 tonnes of carbon, including plankton fed by its feces, each year. The more whales, the more plankton, the more fish for humans to eat, and the more carbon sequestered in the marine food web. Returning whales to their pre-exploitation numbers would sequester 30 megatonnes of carbon over one whale’s lifespan.
(references 26, 27, 28 in PTBOCC)
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This is an excerpt from Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change, beginning with the last paragraph on page 28.
-- -- --
I recently (Spring 2020) spoke with Bruce Mate, Director Emeritus of the Marine Mammal Institute, Oregon State University, Hatfield Marine Science Center: I think we should put alarms, “deer whistles,” on the prows of ships to warn whales, who don’t always hear ships coming at them, or for some reason can’t judge the speed, direction or distance; the entire bulk of the ship is between its engine and screws, and the whale, and all that noise echoing off the bottom and the surface must be acoustically confusing. Blue whales feed among California’s Northern Channel Islands, a major shipping corridor. Ship strikes killed at least five in 2006, and when asked, some shipping companies reduced their speed from 30 knots through the islands to 15; some didn’t. But we are talking about climate change. Mate said that since 2015 many of the whales are emaciated, starving. He said that’s “Attributable to the warm water blob which reduced productivity of the krill in the eastern North Pacific.”
The Blob is a “marine heat wave,” that cyclically warms the eastern Pacific from Alaska to California; the hottest ever was from 2014 into 2016. It’s back, in 2019 and 2020, and on track to be even worse. Water temperatures are as much as 5.5 °C above average in places, causing coral bleaching and toxic algal blooms, and deeply impacting the marine food web, including the salmon fishing, crabbing, and clamming industries. These marine heat waves, around the world, are becoming more frequent and getting hotter. That’s not climate change? Here’s one such hot spot, right here at home, already starving whales and fishing families and reducing our protein supply. And here I thought we had the whales, at least, pretty much saved.
We might want to redouble our efforts to save the whales; they help fight climate change and maintain the entire marine food web. A great whale accumulates around 33 tonnes of carbon in its body, sequestering as much carbon, researchers say, as 1,500 trees? Wood is about half carbon, so that doesn’t make sense, but 33 tonnes is 33 tonnes. Most whales sink to the bottom when they die; there they are eaten by a myriad of smaller creatures, sequestering that carbon in the marine food web, an environmental service calculated to be worth $2 million per whale.
Krill, squid, and other whale foods avoid sunlight, and the whales follow them down to feed, during the day. The whales defecate at the surface, returning vast clouds of vital nutrients (the “whale pump”) that fertilize plankton that absorb carbon, feed great numbers of marine creatures, or sink to the bottom, taking their carbon with them, when they die. A sperm whale is estimated to sequester 16 tonnes of carbon, including plankton fed by its feces, each year. The more whales, the more plankton, the more fish for humans to eat, and the more carbon sequestered in the marine food web. Returning whales to their pre-exploitation numbers would sequester 30 megatonnes of carbon over one whale’s lifespan.
(references 26, 27, 28 in PTBOCC)
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