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