At one point there were more than 350,000 Blue whales in our oceans. Today there are about 10,000. The profound loss of these and other types of whales doesn't just change our ocean ecosystems – it might also be impacting our atmospheric climate. Because it turns out that whales are enormous collectors of carbon.
Heidi Pearson is an Associate Professor of Marine Biology at the University of Alaska Southeast. Her team's recent paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution investigates the possibility that whale recovery could play a role in the removal of circulating carbon dioxide from our atmosphere.
