POPE FRANCIS AND GLOBAL WARMING

Laudato Si'

Laudato Si' is the title of a letter to the faithful that Pope Francis had been preparing for the past year and finally released in the past week or so.  Popular press accounts indicate he comes out firmly on the side of those indicating human activities are major contributors to global warming, a view shared by most informed scientists.

Human activity is more than just "the straw that broke the camel's back", even though non-human factors are the major determinants of climate.  We are currently contributing to a rise in temperatures above the temperatures variations produced by natural cycling due largely to solar output and lesser factors such as volcanic activity.  Does it make a difference whether we are adding one or more shovels full of straw to break the camels back?  While we argue about it the damage is being done.

Our plundering of resources is somewhat difficult to see as degrading the environment until the damage is severe.  Pollute the air or rivers and others downwind or downstream will pay the cost in lung disease or polluted water.  Wealth often comes to the ones polluting; meanwhile the poor lack the resources to purify their water and/or their air.  Pope Francis is apparently adding his voice to those recognizing the problem.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

Near the middle of the past century Garret Hardin wrote an essay entitled The Tragedy of the Commons.  He used the example of earlier times in England when townspeople could pasture their cows on a central green area free to all.  As some found they could sell more milk by having more than one cow they added to their herd.  As others did the same the greens became overcrowded and cows gave less milk so one cow was no longer enough to feed your family.

Common resources include natural areas, our waters and our air, our view of the sun and the stars, and perhaps also our mineral resources.  It is difficult to manage many natural resources that are international in nature.

We still have a lot to learn.  I thought I had considered the important facts when I proposed the sperm whales had a significant role recycling nitrogen in the ocean food chain as illustrated many years ago by the following figure.

Then, after reading a 2010 book by Claire Parkinson discussed in the post,
http://evolutioninsights.blogspot.com/2013/11/science-whales-and-climate-change.html , I realized I had not considered its role in the oceanic carbon dioxide sink and climate change as noted in the post.  The post of May 17, this year  [ http://evolutioninsights.blogspot.com/2015/05/abyssal-ocean-environment-and-extreme.html ] has some concept of how global warming may have a role in hurricane intensity patterns.

"VIRTUE IN MODERATION"

The phrase in Latin was the motto of my undergraduate college.  I have found that, especially in biology, the sciences benefit from realizing things are seldom only black or white, but most often some intermediate shade of gray.  We are seldom extreme introverts or extreme extroverts, most are somewhere else along the spectrum between.  When studying the environment there are multiple causes functioning in most things under observation; so simple answers are not easily given.  Such a fact should not be an excuse for doing nothing to improve our environment.

Joseph G. Engemann     June 25, 2015

SCIENCE: WHALES AND CLIMATE CHANGE

A MUST READ BOOK

Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix is a 2010 book written by Claire A. Parkinson.  Chapter 11, Compounding Social Pressures, should be required reading for all scientists and would be scientists as well as those in the publishing and grant awarding fields and members of Congress and their staffs.  It is also an excellent reference for those interested in an objective assessment of the global warming/cooling controversy.

A major social pressure affecting scientific output in some unfortunate instances is peer pressure.  The pressure is not only seen in the peer review outcomes of publication and grant results but in modified behavior by scientists as well.

WHALES AND THE OCEANS AS A CARBON DIOXIDE SINK

While reading her book it occurred to me that a carbon sink aspect exists in the role of sperm whales (see August 31, 2013 blog on the whale’s role in fisheries production) that I did not think of when originally working on the topic in the 1970’s.  It was not part of the discussion in the joint manuscript I was working on with Dr. Patrick Kangas in 1989 (unpublished).  But it could be inferred from the massive amounts of carbon (tens of millions of tons) in the primary production by marine algae resulting from the sperm whale’s ammonia recycling role.  Recovery of sperm whale numbers to pre-whaling levels would more than double the value of the existing marine sink functioning in atmospheric carbon dioxide reduction.

The gradual rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the whaling years may have been as much a result of whaling as it was from the industrial revolution.

The climate concerns aside, Parkinson’s book gives remarkable insights into the way science functions.  I also want to thank Dr. Charles Heller for making the book available to me and prompting me to read it.  At the time of writing her book, Dr. Parkinson was climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  One focus of her work has been the increase/decrease seen in Arctic and Antarctic sea ice.  If you know Dr. Parkinson, please convey my enthusiastic response to her book.

Joseph G. Engemann      November 4, 2013

SPERM WHALES CAN AIDE OCEAN FISHERIES

SPERM WHALE INTERVENTION IN MARINE NUTRIENT RECYCLING

Available nitrogen is a limiting factor in marine food chains.  Nitrogen is needed by the algae at the base of open ocean food chains.  Atmospheric nitrogen can be fixed into available nitrogen by some marine microorganisms, but not in quantities needed to support a thriving food chain.  Ammonia or some other form of nitrogen can be recycled in the food chain when it is released by protein metabolism of other organisms.

The majority of the open ocean is like a biological desert because of the limiting factor of low available nitrogen.  What is there can be removed by - sea birds depositing guano on land, commercial and sport fish harvesting, and detritus and dead organisms carrying it to deep water and eventual loss to geologic deposits on the sea bed.

The first two sources of removal are somewhat balanced by return to the sea by rivers containing fertilizer and food nitrogenous components.  That makes coastal waters more productive than the open sea.  The second source of removal  can also be balanced by return due to up-welling currents producing high productivity in some localized regions in response to some cyclic weather induced currents.  Once in the deep sea deposits it is mostly trapped for long periods of geologic time.  But before it is trapped, a significant amount can be returned to surface waters by sperm whale intervention.

Sedimentation of small organic particles in the open ocean is very slow.  They can be recycled in intermediate level food chains before the component nutrients reach the seabed.  One particularly effective avenue for recycling is the intervention of ammoniacal squid that live at considerable depths in the ocean and accumulate ammonia from protein metabolism as a flotation material.  A portion of that accumulated ammonia will be returned to surface waters by sperm whales feeding on those deep water squid as well as giant squid.

The great reduction of sperm whale numbers has probably been a major factor in decline of some marine fisheries.  The reduced growth of phytoplankton diminished both the amount of food to those higher in the food chain and their ability to recover from over-fishing.

Fortunately, very little harvesting of sperm whales is occurring today.  But recovery to former numbers is very slow because so few are left, and their well-being in terms of learned culture passed on socially may have been impaired.  I tried to alert congress and our representative to the United Nations (in the 1970's) of the need to protect sperm whales to save fisheries.  About the same time there developed an international consensus to ban sperm whaling.  But Japan did not join the consensus and continued to harvest some for sperm whale research for a while.  I wrote a paper for a Japanese newspaper competition for submissions on environmental matters, but it did not get accepted.  

I thank Dr. Patrick C. Kangas, then at Eastern Michigan University, later at the University of Maryland, who alerted me to much of the quantitative contribution aspect of sperm whale intervention.  

Living giant squid have recently been shown on television for the first time.  An introduction to some of the data used above can be found in Berzin (1972) and Clarke (1977).

References

Berzin, A. A.  1972.  The Sperm Whale.  Israel Program for Scientific Translations.  374 pp.

Clarke, M. R.  1977.  Beaks, nets and numbers.  Symp. Zool. Soc. Lond., 38:89-126.

Joseph G. Engemann     August 31, 2013.

SPERM WHALES

Whales are impressive animals.  The largest are said to be even larger than the largest dinosaurs.  My specialty deals with mostly very small animals, the invertebrates.  But the largest invertebrate, the giant squid, is a  food item for the sperm whale, the largest of the toothed whales.  During the time when sperm whales were relentlessly hunted for their oil, stomach analyses showed that squid were a major part of their diet.  Perhaps the most abundant squids in their diet were ammoniacal squid which live at great depths and retain high levels of ammonia compounds from their food.  The stored ammonia is thought to serve as a flotation device reducing the squid's need to swim to avoid sinking.

Longevity

Records of sperm whales from whaling days showed the average size was considerably larger than today.  Some of the largest males had deformed teeth suggested greater age than the largest sperm whales of today.  Tooth layering suggests the large ones in recent years approach one hundred years in age.  I think it may have been my search for long-lived animals triggered by my findings about extreme longevity in the deep sea (evolutioninsights 6/22/2013 post) that triggered my interest in sperm whales.

Deep diving

The large males dive deeper and stay down longer than any other mammal.  Perhaps the pressure is an additional factor in their ability to stay submerged for so long in addition to the known factors of high levels of myoglobin for oxygen storage in muscle and circulatory shifts to keep essential organs functioning.

The deep dives go into water only a few degrees above freezing in temperature.  The layer of blubber on the body not only insulates them from the cold, but because fat is much lighter than sea water it balances some of the weight of the heavier than sea water bones.  Much of the volume of the enormous head is filled with oil containing organs which counterbalances the weight of the bones of the skull and jaws.

Baleen whales

The blue whale is the largest whale and is one of the baleen whales that feed extensively on krill.  Krill are small crustaceans, but very numerous in some colder parts of the oceans.  Baleen is the filter on the whale's jaw that sifts out the krill from enormous quantities of water.  The blue whale may be able to select a layer of water where the krill are concentrated.  Some baleen whales are known to concentrate food organisms by circling a cluster until they are in a dense column that they can take much of into their enormous mouth cavity and filter them from the water.

Whales seem most closely related to some ancient hoofed mammals.  They branched off from our evolutionary line millions of years ago.  I will have one or two more posts on aspects of sperm whales not generally covered in discussions of their natural history.  One is their unusually important role in marine food chains, the other is an overlooked function of the oil storage organs in the head.

Joseph G. Engemann   August 29, 2013