Whales Can Save the Planet
these magnificent creatures could be the key to reducing CO2
Moby Dick may well be a classic, but I’ve never read it. Never wanted to. I am vehemently against hunting whales — or indeed, any other creature.
But I recently read something thrilling about whales — and it has reassured me that Nature knows what she is doing. It has reaffirmed the thought that we need to go all out to protect whales, not just because they are wonderful, intelligent creatures, but because we actually need them to survive.
What? Are you telling me whales are one of the keys to surviving climate change?
It really gets to me when I read about whale hunts. How in the name of all that’s humane can anyone contemplate doing this to any animal? But we’re a vicious race — or some of us are. I cannot believe people actually go to watch a bullfight. It’s not a fight for the bull, it’s a slaughter — and a slow one at that.
They do such awful things to animals in Spain that I have made a decision never to go there. I will not support their tourist industry or anything they do until they stop torturing animals.
But let’s not go into that. It angers and upsets me even to think about it. I want to tell you about something far more positive.
Whales are huge — the largest animals on this planet. The sea supports their body weight and in it, they are graceful and agile. It’s a perfect environment for them (or was, until we started polluting it, but that’s another topic). For a whale, the world is a little smaller. A journey of ten thousand miles is one they commonly undertake to find new feeding grounds.
All sorts of different whales exist, but those huge ones — The Blue Whales — weigh more than 200 tons. I can’t even imagine what that’s like, but I know it makes for a massive problem when a whale is washed up on a beach and people try to get it back into the sea.
Blue whales are the type that don’t have teeth. Instead, they have these long fringes that are like strainers, gathering little shrimp creatures called krill into their mouths.
Whales are mammals. They give birth to babies and produce milk to feed them. The care they show their young is obvious when you see the baby swimming alongside its mother. They are sociable animals and how intelligent they are we’re not sure, but there is clearly something wondrous going on in those brains of theirs. They are good navigators, have complex social behaviour and they actually create music — their own songs which are echoed across the oceans.
So, wondrous creatures all round. But how do they help to save the planet?
This hit me right between the eyes: I recently read that whales absorb more carbon than rain forests.
Not only that, whales produce half the world’s oxygen.
I did not know that. I’m all for planting more trees — and for the love of heaven, can we do something quickly about the Amazon rainforest? But as it turns out, whales live a long time; some can reach two hundred years of age.
During this long lifetime, they store carbon in their bodies. Thirty-three tons of it. When a whale dies, it sinks to the bottom of the sea and takes that carbon with it.
So while we’ve been focusing on planting more trees, whales have been silently soaking up CO2 without a murmur — and none of us noticed.
But that’s not the end of it. Whales dive deep and when they come up to the surface to breathe, they also release their waste which then feeds plankton, helping it to thrive.
Why do we care about plankton? Phytoplankton contribute around 50% of the world’s oxygen. Not finished yet — plankton also captures about 40% of the world’s CO2. This is equivalent to the amount taken in by 1.7 trillion trees.
Yet people are still killing whales. There are about 1.3 million whales in existence at the moment, but if they were left in peace to breed and increase, how much more beneficial would they be? Even a small increase of 1% of plankton would absorb millions of tons of CO2 every year — as would the whales themselves.
Economists, looking at the value whales bring in monetary terms, have placed a value of $2 million per whale.
Only $2 million? Surely they are priceless.
