When talking of the forests of the ocean you might be forgiven for thinking that I am talking about coral. But it is whales that are referred to as forests of the ocean due to their ability to store large amounts of carbon in their bodies. Much like when a tree is cut down, whales release that stored carbon when they are killed.
In fact after a century of whaling it is estimated that more than 100 million tonnes, which equals a large forest’s worth of carbon, has been released into the atmosphere. Scientists from the US revealed this estimate of carbon release by whaling at a major ocean sciences meeting in the US.
Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon storing capacity of whales as they grew.
“Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon,” he said. “And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that’s removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere.”
In the early days of whaling the animals were a source of lamp oil and when this was burned it released carbon directly back into the air.
“And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean. If they die where it’s deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years.” Said Dr Pershing.
Dr Pershing’s team has estimated that 100 years of whaling has released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000sqkm of virgin forest. In relative terms this is admittedly a small amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year. But in terms of the marine ecosystem, whales play a very important part in storing and transporting carbon.
In Brazil reforestation schemes have been set up to allow trees to grow and store carbon, this means that the Brazilian government is able to earn and sell carbon credits. Dr Pershing has suggested that a similar scheme be set up for whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks. By simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could sequester greenhouse gas, in amounts that are comparable to some reforestation schemes.
“The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales, and allow countries to sell their fish quota as carbon credits,” he explained. “You could use those credits as an incentive to reduce the fishing pressure or to promote the conservation of some of these species.”
Other scientists have also found that this research poses a fascinating conundrum.
Professor Daniel Costa, a marine animal researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BBC News: “So many more groups are looking at the importance of these large animals in the carbon cycle. And it’s one of those things that, when you look at it, you think: ‘ This is so obvious, why didn’t we think of this before?’.”
To explain why whales are so good at storing carbon Dr Pershing pointed out that with their massive size whales are more efficient than smaller animals. He expanded this theory by comparing a small dog with a large dog.
“My wife’s 6lb (2.7kg) toy poodle eats one cup of food per day and my dog – a 60lb standard poodle eats five cups of food per day,” he said. “That’s only five times as much food but my dog weighs ten times as much.”
So by taking this analogy further the marine carbon credit scheme could be applied to other large marine animals such as white sharks and the endangered Bluefin tuna.
Dr Pershing said: “These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they’re fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die].”
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April 15th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
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