How whales fight climate changeWe all love whales, right? But there’s a reason to admire whales that you might not have heard about. When carbon gets in to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it traps heat and messes with the planet’s climate. But carbon is also part of the bodies of all living things, especially ones that weigh a lot, and live a long time. Like whales. One whale can store as much carbon as a thousand trees. In this way, they help to hold back climate change. And when a whale’s time on earth is over, it’s body falls to the bottom of the ocean taking all that carbon with it. Every whales’ poop is good for the planet because it helps to feed phytoplankton. When they dive to eat krill, then pee and poop in shallower waters, they spread nutrients that phytoplankton love. Phytoplankton may be tiny, but there are a lot of them. Phytoplankton capture four times as much carbon as the Amazon rainforest. But whales are under threat. Since hunting them began, we lost three quarters of them and 97% of blue whales. If whale populations recovered, we would have 4-5 million whales which could capture the emissions of 400,000 cars. See this post and more interesting ones on Imagine5
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