People often use lazy donkey grinding and peeing a lot to describe lazy people. But in the ocean, there is also a creature that eats more and pulls more, the whale. Unlike lazy people, whales are so large that they can bring great benefits to natural ecosystems. What's going on here? Whale droppings are really precious?
How much can whales eat?
Whales are one of the largest creatures ever made on Earth. But for the most part, they survive their lives by eating a small shrimp called Ququil, which doesn't do much damage to other species in the ocean. So how amazing are they eating? In the case of blue whales, an adult blue whale needs to eat about 16 tons of quequil per day to be full, a bowhead whale has to eat about 6 tons of food a day, and a sperm whale also has to eat more than 1 ton of food.
In addition, people call whale feeding "whale swallowing", because these guys eat, even the sea water swallowed into the stomach, the amount of food can be described as very amazing. But some wonder how biologists know how many tons of food whales can eat. In fact, biologists who study whales don't know how much they can eat, but they can make the closest predictions through scientific means.
When the study began, biologists did not directly observe whales. They studied the diets of smaller mammals, such as dolphins, and made estimates based on the size of the whales or based on what was in the stomachs of dead whales, so the estimated data was not close to the whales' true food intake. Later, they used GPS to track the whales, recording and observing each of the whales' predations in detail.
They also use drones and sonar to measure the whale's mouth, as well as the size of the krill colony, to estimate how much food the whale can swallow in a single predation. To their surprise, this allowed them to discover that whales could eat more than they had previously thought.
By comparison, previous estimates were that all whales near the Pacific coast of North America eat 2 million tons of seafood each year. But the new study found that each whale actually ate three times or more than the previous 2 million tons.
Whale poop is a treasure?
As the saying goes, there are in and out, whales eat an amazing amount, and the excretion of feces is naturally also sufficient. You may feel uncomfortable seeing this, isn't the ocean full of whale feces? How disgusting that is! In fact, this is only the subjective feeling of human beings, for marine life and marine ecology, whales excrete a large amount of feces, can be more precious than human gold.
Maintainer of marine ecology
In marine ecosystems, whales are an extremely complex character. In the Southern Ocean, the presence of a large number of microalgae (a type of phytoplankton) makes it one of the most productive ecosystems on Earth.
For krill, small fish and crustaceans, these phytoplankton happen to be an important food source, while cetaceans, birds and other fish feed on smaller marine organisms such as fish and shrimp, forming an interlocking food circle.
Among them, whales are an extremely important link. They swallow a huge amount of krill, after gastrointestinal digestion, will discharge a large amount of iron-containing feces, so that rich nutrients will be spread into the seawater, become an important source of nutrients in the ocean, can help phytoplankton grow rapidly, so that krill have sufficient food to grow and reproduce, forming a cycle of biological chains, very helpful to maintain the ecological balance of the ocean.
Whale droppings, climate regulators
We know that since the beginning of the industrialization process of human beings, the natural ecology has been seriously damaged, for example, the emission of a large amount of carbon dioxide by human industrial production has accelerated the greenhouse effect of the earth. In addition to maintaining marine ecosystems, whale manure is also a natural "climate regulator" that helps the ocean absorb more carbon dioxide, which is conducive to improving the marine climate and slowing global warming.
Why is whale droppings slowing global warming? When it comes to organisms that absorb carbon dioxide and create value, you must think of green plants. But in reality, plankton in the ocean has a stronger ability to absorb carbon dioxide than green plants. According to the data, marine plankton have far less biomass than land plants, but they absorb more than 45% of carbon, compared with only 53% of land plants.
It can be seen that marine plankton adsorb carbon is much stronger than that of land plants. Combined with the foregoing, whale feces are the best nutrients for plankton, which can promote their growth, that is, whale manure can make the ocean plankton become more, and the biomass of plankton increases, which can adsorb more carbon, thus playing a role in slowing global warming. That's why biologists say whale dung is the secret weapon to save ecosystems!
It has extremely high medicinal value and economic value
Whale feces not only have an irreplaceable effect on the natural ecology, but also have great benefits for people. There is a whale called sperm whale, when they have squid, octopus and other mollusks in the intestines of the beak bone is not fully digested, its intestines will produce a large amount of oil and secretions to wrap the undigested food, form a whole secretion, and then excrete it.
After hundreds of years of oxidation by seawater, this secretion will change from light black to white, becoming an extremely valuable Chinese medicinal material: ambergris. The ancients thought that ambergris was the saliva of the dragon, hence the name. As a medicinal herb, ambergris has the effect of curing cough and asthma, relieving heartache, invigorating blood and improving sperm, and its medicinal value is extremely high. In addition, ambergris can also be used as a raw material for top perfumes, or it can be treasured as a collection, with a high appreciation space.
What happens when the ocean is free of whales?
In the 19th and 20th centuries, industrial whaling pushed many whales to the brink of extinction, with a disproportionate adverse effect on the waters off Antarctica. Humans have killed about 99 percent of the world's blue whales in just a few decades, and fisheries experts expect krill populations to increase dramatically when whales disappear. The reality, however, is that krill populations have also declined significantly with the disappearance of whales.
A blue whale eats about 16 tons of krill a day and excretes a volcanic amount of feces, which contains a very high amount of iron in the feces, which is very conducive to the growth of small algae organisms, so as to provide enough food for small marine organisms such as krill, thereby maintaining the entire biological chain. It can be said that whale dung is the guarantee for the prosperity of fish and shrimp populations.
If whales disappear, many small marine life will follow. And as the saying goes, when a whale falls, all things are born. Whales disappear, the world will no longer see whales fall, the deep sea of whale carcasses for living organisms will also be extinct, over time, some creatures disappear, some organisms increase, the marine ecological balance will be destroyed, the ocean will appear biological mass extinction. Changes in marine ecology will naturally affect the ecology of the entire earth, which is related to the survival of human beings.
summary
The existence of whales has a very important protective effect on the natural ecology, but in the era of the Industrial Revolution, humans hunted them for economic gain, which also led to a sharp decline in the number of whales such as blue whales.
Nowadays, although people no longer hunt whales in large quantities, the number of whales has long been small, and if they do not care to protect this creature, once they become extinct, human beings may not be far from extinction.
Author: Cream997 Review: Henna