Since whaling was banned temporarily through an international agreement in 1986, populations have been slowly recovering. We calculated that this figure had dropped to 60,000 tonnes by 1972, because of the impact of centuries of commercial whaling. But the effectiveness of these animals as a carbon ‘pump’, moving carbon from the atmosphere, and eventually to the bottom of the ocean, varies according to the size of cetacean populations.īefore they were exploited on an industrial scale, whales were abundant in the Antarctic, and a team that I worked with during my master’s estimated that they sequestered a total of 400,000 tonnes of carbon per year 1. Because they’re so huge, whales hold a lot of carbon in their tissues and, after dying, they trap that carbon on the ocean floor for more than a century. One striking example comes from my master’s degree, also at Montpellier, which focused on quantifying the carbon sequestered in the Southern Hemisphere since 1890 by the carcasses of five species of whale. Climate change affects living organisms, which themselves affect greenhouse-gas emissions. The way in which carbon moves into the ocean through whales demonstrates the complex links between biodiversity and climate. Why are you investigating carbon sequestration in animals? Credit: Raphael SeguinAnaëlle Durfort quantifies carbon sequestered in marine fauna for her PhD in ecology at the University of Montpellier, France, to highlight the links between biodiversity and climate change. For her master’s degree, Anaëlle Durfort calculated levels of carbon sequestered by whale carcasses that had fallen to the ocean floor in the Southern Hemisphere.
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