Some Whales Can Eat Upwards of 16 Tons of Tiny Shrimp a Day

All wild mammal biomass. Domesticated mammal biomass is massive. In fact, humans + our livestock comprise 96% of mammal biomass: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-muc...

Self preservation, ironically. They normally spend all day swimming around leisurely, but can do a tail flop to escape danger quickly. I say ironically (don't kill me if I'm misusing the word) because that same big abdominal muscle leads to creatures, especially humans, seeking them out for their meatiness.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caridoid_escape_reaction

I have a population of shrimp that have been breeding in my aquarium for quite some time now. They spend most of their time picking through detritus and otherwise managing the cleanliness of the rocks and sandbed. I'm curious if their 'meatiness' has something to do with how rapidly they grow and reproduce and the size of the clutches involved. A single female can have around 100 eggs or more attached to the underside of her belly, producing that many eggs has to require a decent amount of calories. Another hypothesis is that they appear to be detrivores, and aside from the snails co-habitating with them, they have very little competition for a seemingly endless supply of fish poop and plants to munch on. The variety I have are clear, so it's quite interesting to watch their inner workings as they eat and reproduce. Where you'd expect the "brain" to be, they have a stomach that is constantly engaged in some type of basic peristaltic motion that can pause itself when they are alerted or startled, unlike in humans where this is an autonomic process as far as I know.

Their locomotion requires an enormous amount of power. This is not uncommon in arthropods; cockroaches and crickets do too.

> It seems like these organisms are > 90% meat. Why do they have so much meat? What do they need all that meat for?

Whales cultivated them for consumption.

On the other hand, these magnificent creatures are basically genocidal maniacs, killing hundreds of millions of other living creatures on a daily basis, just to feed their largesse.

Cows, pigs, chicken, tuna…they’re all magnificent creatures.

> Thats 32,000 pounds. In a single day. If I ate 5 pounds of food a day, it would take me nearly 18 years to eat that much!

It helps to be 200 tonnes though, or to grow from 3 to 200 tonnes in 10-15 years (3 to 20 in the 6~8 months weaning period, blue whales are estimated to produce >200kg milk a day).

They live predominantly in Iceland, Norway and Japan.

Joey Chestnut eats about that much weight in just a few minutes each year.

It's not impossible, but I'd say pretty rare to find someone who can do so.

Hmm, being in the ocean means they have to burn a lot more calories relative to their mass, I imagine.

Many baleen whales are seasonal eaters - they migrate yearly between feeding in the (say) arctic and breeding in the (say) sub-tropics. Imagine that your 200lbs person needed to pack on enough weight in the winter to fast through the summer.

(Yes, obviously this wouldn't work so well for humans. Whales have adapted to it, have economies of scale, and the water supports their weight "for free".)

Another day older and deeper in debt

a plastic bag and a harpoon in the neck

I have seen the argument (in Derrick Jensen) that whales migrate vertically, so the iron they distribute is somewhere else than originally, placing whales (if so) as a key factor in an iron circulation system.

Well, digestive processes in the whale could speed the cycle, yes?

But I take your point.

In biology, things aren't always that clean. Does whale poo release the iron in a way which is more accessible to other life forms vs dead krill? Perhaps one of these floats better than the other, or diffuses more evenly, or through some other mechanism makes it easier for the phytoplankton to access the iron.

The shameful thing is that we have learned how to commercially harvest krill and sell it as animal feed. Which means we are strip-mining this resource also from the ocean. Which before too long will lead to starving the whales to death, followed by the collapse of the krill populations because we just take, we don't give back.

'animal feed' includes pet food.