“Whale poop is a treasure,” says Elizabeth Burgess, a scientist at the New England Aquarium. “It can give us an insight into what these creatures are experiencing.”
This seemingly surprising statement is made in the opening thirty seconds of a recent PBS Nova short video about how whale poop could be a powerful tool for cooling the planet and fostering the marine habitat.
But give it a moment’s thought, and is it that surprising? Humans have used poop or poop simulations (fertilizer is like poop on steroids, or super poop), to grow crops for thousands of years. What better source of fertilizer could there be than the largest mammals on the planet?
“When we talk about whale poop, it’s always a funny thing. And it is a funny thing. I laugh at it. I think my mom laughs at what I do. But that’s ok.”
This is Matthew Savoca, at Stanford University. “You think about it,” he continues, “fertilizing ecosystems with poop is not unusual.”
Whale poop, being rich in nitrogen and other life-enriching chemicals, becomes food for phytoplankton, the tiny creatures that whales eat. So just like fertilizers on land, the more whale poop there is, the more phytoplankton.
But these phytoplankton do more than just float around eating whale poop (what a life). Like other plant life, they consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
In fact, they’re responsible for about half of the world’s oxygen. And that, in theory, would help with climate change by removing more of the most prevalent greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
These scientists then follow whale groups and collect their poop to run tests and track the health of the whales and, by extension, our planet. This is apparently an easy thing to do since by the looks of it whales like to do their business toward the surface of the water.
How this is a done is another story. Are they using nets? Is some guy hanging out the side with a test tube? I feel like there’s a season of quality TV here a la Deadliest Catch.
The bottom line is: healthy whales lead to a healthy world.
Learn more by checking out the video here.
Neil