Pis and whale droppings

In the huge list of unsolved puzzles that science has for a long time the stools of the whales. We knew that these animals ascended from the marine depths where they usually feed and made their needs near the surface.

Drawing a parallelism with the fertilization processes in the signing land, this led to the cetologists to imagine each of these promotions of the whales as a festival for shallowwater species. And the truth is that it is.

What nobody even dared to imagine was THE PIS.

“Pis”? Indeed. Ballena Pis is a very serious matter: only one of these bugs can produce almost 1000 liters of urine a day. Despite this, no one had stopped to think that this dark yellow liquid that stains the water green where it passes could be more than pee. Until now.

“The great surprise of the study is that urine far exceeds the other sources of nitrogen”, Joe Roman explainedConservation Biologist at the University of Vermont. And, even if it seems, he has his crumb.

Do you miss any nutrient? Ask for a bearded whale! From what Roman’s team has discovered, Barbadas whales transport huge amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus from the polar areas where they feed on the tropical areas where they raise. In good part of the process they depend on the reserves that accumulated in the polar regions.

And without those critical nutrients that expel, “many marine plants and animals would not survive.”

A “pump” of nutrients. The team He examined The amount of nutrients that moved the Barbadas whales through the ocean, but not only with their pee. They also examined the impact of their placentas and their corpses. According to your estimates, Every year, every barbada Move 3,784 tons of nitrogen and 46,512 tons of organic matter in areas with few nutrients.

And that is a lot. Lot. According to Roman“in a place like Hawaii, whales provide more nitrogen than the wind and currents transport.” In fact, Heidi Pearson explained From the University of Alaska Southeast, in National Geographic, “these nutrients stimulate the growth of phytoplankton on the surface of the ocean and also enrich deep water ecosystems.”

A world we leave. Little by little we began to intuit the enormous impact it produced Hunting (and almost extinction) of whales: For centuries we have dedicated ourselves to removing vital ecological mechanisms without being aware of what we were doing.

Now that we know, a good part of the economy and the societies of the world are so accustomed to it that it is very difficult to back down. But the idea that the ocean would be very different without the pee and the whale droppings remind us that there is still a lot to do.

Image | Mike Doherty

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