Saving the Whales Helps Save the Climate.
This is an excerpt from Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change, beginning on page 304.
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I spoke with Bruce Mate, Director Emeritus of the Marine Mammal Institute, Oregon State University, Hatfield Marine Science Center, in the spring of 2020: I think we should put alarms, “deer whistles,” on 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 alone, 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 returned in 2019 and 2020, and was on track to be even worse. Water temperatures were 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 reducing our protein supply and starving whales and fisherfolk. And here I thought we had the whales, at least, pretty much saved. [i]
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 1500 trees? That doesn’t make sense to me, 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 that fertilize plankton (the “whale pump”) that absorb carbon and feed great numbers of marine creatures in the “sunlight zone,” 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. [ii] [iii] [iv]
I emailed comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg, who studies cetaceans, with my idea for “deer whistles” on ships to warn whales. “Great idea,” she said, “but it’s already been tried, and it didn’t work.” She said that cetaceans instinctively flee predators in a straight line, because if they dodge the predator can cut the tangent and catch them faster. No slightest disrespect, Dr. Reidenberg, but I have a hard time accepting that a creature with a brain five or six times the size of mine, and in several ways more complex, is so driven by instinct that it can’t learn a new trick. We know cetaceans communicate abstract thoughts one to another, and they communicate over long distances; if just one whale figures out that ships are not orcas, that they travel in a straight line and all you gotta do is get the heck out the way, his / her whole species will “get it” overnight, like the “one-hundredth monkey” thing on steroids. So I hope that someone somewhere is still working on this.
Stubborn, aren’t I.
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[i] Mongabay.com, “‘The Blob’ Is Back: Pacific Heat Wave Already Second-Largest in Recent History,” Mongabay, September 24, 2019, https://news.mongabay.com/2019/09/the-blob-is-back-pacific-heat-wave-already-second-largest-in-recent-history/.
[ii] Sustainable Human, “How Whales Change Climate,” YouTube, Nov 30, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18HxXve3CM
[iii] Wikipedia, “How Whales Can Solve the Climate Crisis,” YouTube, Dec. 6, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYBwHnz-yZE
[iv] Wikipedia, “Can whales solve climate change? | Carbon sequestration,” YouTube, Mar. 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhXGAsZzvcU
(references 26, 27, 28 in PTBOCC)
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This is an excerpt from Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change, beginning on page 304.
-- -- --
I spoke with Bruce Mate, Director Emeritus of the Marine Mammal Institute, Oregon State University, Hatfield Marine Science Center, in the spring of 2020: I think we should put alarms, “deer whistles,” on 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 alone, 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 returned in 2019 and 2020, and was on track to be even worse. Water temperatures were 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 reducing our protein supply and starving whales and fisherfolk. And here I thought we had the whales, at least, pretty much saved. [i]
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 1500 trees? That doesn’t make sense to me, 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 that fertilize plankton (the “whale pump”) that absorb carbon and feed great numbers of marine creatures in the “sunlight zone,” 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. [ii] [iii] [iv]
I emailed comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg, who studies cetaceans, with my idea for “deer whistles” on ships to warn whales. “Great idea,” she said, “but it’s already been tried, and it didn’t work.” She said that cetaceans instinctively flee predators in a straight line, because if they dodge the predator can cut the tangent and catch them faster. No slightest disrespect, Dr. Reidenberg, but I have a hard time accepting that a creature with a brain five or six times the size of mine, and in several ways more complex, is so driven by instinct that it can’t learn a new trick. We know cetaceans communicate abstract thoughts one to another, and they communicate over long distances; if just one whale figures out that ships are not orcas, that they travel in a straight line and all you gotta do is get the heck out the way, his / her whole species will “get it” overnight, like the “one-hundredth monkey” thing on steroids. So I hope that someone somewhere is still working on this.
Stubborn, aren’t I.
----------------------
[i] Mongabay.com, “‘The Blob’ Is Back: Pacific Heat Wave Already Second-Largest in Recent History,” Mongabay, September 24, 2019, https://news.mongabay.com/2019/09/the-blob-is-back-pacific-heat-wave-already-second-largest-in-recent-history/.
[ii] Sustainable Human, “How Whales Change Climate,” YouTube, Nov 30, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M18HxXve3CM
[iii] Wikipedia, “How Whales Can Solve the Climate Crisis,” YouTube, Dec. 6, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYBwHnz-yZE
[iv] Wikipedia, “Can whales solve climate change? | Carbon sequestration,” YouTube, Mar. 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhXGAsZzvcU
(references 26, 27, 28 in PTBOCC)
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