Really Big News!

I recently read an article in “Weird Science” by Brandon Keim- The Hidden Power of Whale Poop. I was blown away by the statistics on the declining numbers of the whale population and how human destruction doesn’t just stop with the slaughter of the whales. Before commercial whaling, there were more than 200,000 blue whales in the world, and today we have less than 8,000. A whale’s fecal plume is liquid gold to the ocean and future generations of whales and fish, in other words, it is the ocean’s fertilizer. Because plankton thrives in fecal plume, the less poop there is, the less food they have to eat. This broken cycle of life also affects humans, fish being one of our favorite food sources. This article also contains possibly the largest captured picture of whale fecal plume ever, measuring almost the entire whale’s length!

OC- Natalie Kelley

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