East Australian Humpback whale bounces back from near extinction | Hacker News Reader

East Australian Humpback whale bounces back from near extinction

smh.com.au

111 pointssamizdis50 comments

> The ocean's microscopic, single-celled plant known as phytoplankton produces more oxygen than all forests combined, with marine biologists estimating it contributes between 50 per cent and 85 per cent of the Earth’s oxygen levels.

Holy crap. I didn't know that part.

> When there are not enough whales in the ocean, krill consume phytoplankton at an unsustainable rate and threaten the global oxygen supply.

Unfortunately, "Burn krill, not rainforests!" isn't catchy enough for a bumper sticker.

Yup! Deliberately fostering phytoplankton growth using "iron fertilization" even has its own Wikipedia article [1]. The idea is that iron, not nutrients, is a limiting factor to phytoplankton growth in some areas, so we could boost phytoplankton just by throwing (a suitable form of) iron in the ocean.

IIRC, it's a controversial topic because the lack of a unified regulatory body for oceans makes experimentation difficult, and there are poorly-understood side effects with various algae. Also, wholesale manipulation of an ecosystem for scientific purposes is usually frowned upon (pollution, though, seems to get along just fine...).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

Maybe for small scales but on massive ocean changing scales the limiting factor isn't iron but instead phosphorous in the top water layer. It would have to be included as well as iron. Ref: DOI 10.1007/s10584-010-9799-4

You mean, "Burn krill, not rainforests!" right?

Yes, corrected. Thanks. Hadn't had enough coffee yet.

Holy crap. I didn't know that part

And something like 95% of phytoplankton live in the surface 3 feet of water on the ocean. I.E.,the part of the ocean that gets hit hardest by chemical pollutants. (Especially petrochemicals.)

Wouldn’t whales catch as much plankton as krill? It doesn’t seem like they have a way to distinguish.

It's a filtration process, the plankton might be small enough to escape. But even if it doesn't, prey species usually recover faster than predator species.

Whales fill their mouth wide open with water and spit it out through their baleens, a set of comb-like teeths that filter out everything smaller than a krill. Krills are 1-2 centimeters long and they feed on plankton much smaller than that, so it gets filtered out.

Interestingly there is no clear difference between krill and plankton. Krill are small crustacean animals, while plankton encompasses all organisms, animal or algae or protozoan (including jellyfish), that float passively in a body of water, as opposed to nektons, who swim actively. Altough most krills are nektons, some species, such as amphionides, are plankton.

For anyone interested in learning about phytoplankton and other microorganisms, I highly recommend the YouTube series Journey to the Microcosmos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS2mdmt4JPw&list=PLf3BfsFyWW...

For example this video about diatoms, which are responsible for a quarter to half of the oxygen produced on earth, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygty9HxhFK4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom

Seeing high-quality video of things moving around gives a much more visceral impression than just reading text interspersed with static images, in my opinion.

> diatoms produce quarter to half of the oxygen on earth

Hmmm so plankton is 50-85% and diatoms are 25-50%? So how much are plants adding?

Diatoms are a type of phytoplankton (one of the most common).

> Holy crap. I didn't know that part.

A point that is easily missed is that you could burn all of the biomass currently on the earth and it would do little to the oxygen levels. Oxygen has been contributed to our atmosphere by millennia of forestry and phytoplankton.

When I eat Jello I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and squeeze the Jello through my teeth and imagine I am a whale filtering krill against my baleen.

I think that aspic might be a better gelatin-based analogy. Otherwise it’s just mastication without chewing.

nice

I do this with mashed potatoes.

Whales do considerably more, like recyling iron to the surface where it's needed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale's_faeces

I'd expect the narrow population bottleneck they've been pushed through (down to 150 individuals) would leave them with much less genetic diversity. That could be a serious and very long term problem (or not).

Irrelevant fact: whales can get flu (coronaviruses). Just FYI

Interesting, almost looks as if whale conservation, despite having been started for purely sentimental reasons afaik, has turned out to be saving our asses a bit in terms of climate change and overfishing.

Ecologists frequently focus public efforts on widely recognizable umbrella species. Humpback whales are widely distributed and touch many complex parts of the ecosystem. Making them the face of conservation efforts makes sense, because protecting them entails protecting the ecosystem they live in and rely on.

Influenza viruses are not coronaviruses.

I'm not sure either way. I thought flu is a kind of generic, informal term and coronaviruses can give those symptoms so it's flu, in laymans' terms. I'm probably wrong.

Pre-2020 examples of coronaviruses in humans include:

- the common cold

- SARS

- MERS

The common cold is colloquially differentiated from the common flu. SARS and MERS generally are not referred to as a flu.

It's not a perfect proxy for colloquial language, but if you read the Wikipedia article for SARS for example, it says things like

"SARS produces flu-like symptoms"

and

"an electronic warning system that is part of the World Health Organization's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), picked up reports of a "flu outbreak" in China"

.... where you will note "flu outbreak" is in quotes, meaning... it was not a flu outbreak.

Swine flu, and bird flu, in contrast, colloquially recognized "flus" are in fact variants of Influenza.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

> whales can get flu (coronaviruses).

Hum?...

Yep. Belugas have its own coronavirus SW1, you are right. I didn't knew that. And it seems that bottlenose dolphins have a second one... wow

Is particularly puzzling because it was a single captive animal so maybe beluga was not the main host here. If the memory does not fail me, Dolphinidae can sometimes pick dog viruses in captivity. They have its own poxviruses and morbiliviruses also.

Is a little more complicated than that

Humpbacks and Sperm wales recovered. The later recovered because they do not eat krill.

Right whales recovered partially, the two species from the northern hemisphere still struggle to survive with total populations of around 410 whales and 23 whales. Yes, 23 animals. That would comprise like 12 females or so in total.

They are protected for the last 80 years if I remember correctly. And we are seeing the same animals again and again since this decade. Still not recovered.

China has wiped the yellow river dolphin and most probably also the vaquita, that was endemic from California and could be beyond repair by now. Maybe 5 or 10 reproductive females remaining and a single calf each two years. Coronavirus did more to save the american porpoise in this critical years than the current administration (and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise).

> The ocean single-celled plant known as phytoplankton

> when there are not enough whales krill consume phytoplankton at an unsustainable rate

Both statements are wrong.

I don't understand the claim that they are helping fight climate change.

Is lack of oxygen in the atmosphere a concern at all? Is it a concern for climate change? I've certainly heard of methane and CO2 levels being too high causing problems, but not of Oxygen levels being too low causing problems.

This is a poor explanation in the article.

The basic effect isn't hard to understand: A whale is a lot of biomass, i.e. they store carbon. Dead whales don't completely release all that carbon. And whales help other organisms thrive, which is more biomass and stored carbon.

Here's a better article on the effect: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/12/natures-s...

That is also not what the article is saying, which is that whales eat krill which eat phytoplankton which "eat" CO2—more whales = more phytoplankton.

Whales are a keystone species akin to wolves in Yellowstone, which prey on deer and allow a greater regeneration of plants.

Whales also pump a large amount of nutrients to the surface because they eat deep water species and excrete near the surface when they breathe.

Photosynthesis uses C02 to convert sunlight to energy which is used by the organism and oxygen, as a byproduct, which is released. The more phytoplankton there are, the more CO2 is removed and converted to oxygen. It's exactly the same reason rainforests are good, there's just a shit ton more plankton than there's ever been trees, and their photosynthesis is efficient.

https://earthsky.org/earth/how-much-do-oceans-add-to-worlds-...

Rainforests provide a lot more than the oxygen of their trees. They provide habitats for countless species of diverse animals across nearly the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom, many of which can be found exclusively there.

As stated elsewhere in the comments on this article, oxygen in the atmosphere is not an issue for us. It's CO2 and the preservation of other creatures that should motivate us, amongst other things.

If 100% of all photosynthesis stopped today, it would still take literally millions of years before animal life would even notice a change. It took hundreds of millions of years to build to roughly present levels, and very little oxygen is actually consumed. All the "easy" oxygen sinks (like iron turning to rust) are used up. Animals don't really use very much.

Timeline of Humpback whaling...

1700 - Early humpback whaling begins.

1844 - Invention of the explosive harpoon.

1904 - Whaling expands to the Antarctic. (massive decline in populations)

1966 - IWC banned commercial humpback whaling.

1985 - Captain Kirk and his crew arrive from 2286 in a captured Klingon Bird of Prey to retrieve a breeding pair of humpback whales to repopulate the species and save Earth from a random probe that wanted to talk to them

Made my day :)

2010 - still losing roughly 4,000 whales every year to whaling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baleines.png

That is a totally different species of whale.

I failed to notice, thanks for pointing that out.

I wonder if Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales had anything to do with this.

I think it probably did help raise awareness about endangered whales and inspire opposition to whaling.

Humpback whaling was banned globally in 1966, so no.

Banning != stopping, for what its worth. Greater awareness can put pressure on clandestine whaling efforts as well via funding for greater enforcement and related aspects.

New Title: Humpbacks makes comeback after reduction of whaling industry: there, fixed it for ya.

Now if only the humans could somehow find a way to help...

Ssssh. Don’t tell the Japanese whaling ships, they’ll find a way to justify killing them for science (sic).

The humpback bump back will only last if we quiet shipping lanes.

Says who?

Let me Google that for you: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hump...

So let me get this straight, in spite of not quieting the shipping lanes, the population has exploded, which is impossible according to you.

Somebody forgot to tell the whales, apparently.

An increase of 140 individuals to 40,000 individuals over 50 years, during a period in which shipping exponentially increased, seems to contradict your theory. I don't expect a shipping increase from current levels over the next 50 years to be anywhere near as large. There's not much shipping traffic to speak of in the area covered by this article, but even globally, shipping accidents with whales, tragic as they may be, are not killing them off in numbers anywhere near comparable to intentional hunting.

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