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

smithsonianmag.com

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

#31

Post by bell-cot »

RandomWorker wrote: post #21

A big blue whale is about 190t 16t is 8.4% of your body weight. That’s a 200lbs person eating 16lbs of food. Is that impossible? I’d love to see a breakdown of macros of humans and whales. I think 16t wouldn’t seem so crazy.

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".)

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

#32

Post by mellavora »

ars wrote: post #8

"That’s because the more whales eat, the more they poop, releasing nutrients like iron into the ocean water to fertilize the growth of phytoplankton, which in turn serve as a primary food source in the marine food web." Um, the whales are not creating iron. They are eating it and putting (some of) it back where it came from. This articles makes it seem like the more they eat the more iron is there. A dead krill will…

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.

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

#33

Post by Farmadupe »

voz_ wrote: post #26
a9h74j wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caton in Overshoot called humans a detritus species. Your very descriptive paragraph might be mined for metaphors. For example, in place of a brain, does humanity have going a peristaltic action connecting mines to landfills?

Your username and comment make me think GPT3 wrote this. What do you mean?

One of the most thought-provoking aspects of information theory is that when someone says something interesting in a small amount of words, it's indistinguishable from line noise.

tldr; I've never read Overshoot either but I thought the post had an interesting perspective

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

#34

Post by tuatoru »

gumby wrote: post #13
LenP wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

if you are thinking of animals, JBS Haldane had it right: god has an inordinate fondness for beetles. But in the scheme of things, animals aren’t really that big a deal: > Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigato…

> with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons

At that time, perhaps. If average human mass is 30 kg, with 8 billion of us, we mass about 0.24 Gt.

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

#35

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

gumby wrote: post #13
LenP wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

if you are thinking of animals, JBS Haldane had it right: god has an inordinate fondness for beetles. But in the scheme of things, animals aren’t really that big a deal: > Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigato…

Ants queens, for example, mate only once in their life and live for up to 20 years. All the individual ants in the colony are effectively clones from the genetic material of that one foundational mating act.

So it makes sense to consider the ant colony to be one "organism", and yes, it's very much a long-lived, intelligent and massive organism.

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

#36

Post by jacquesm »

voz_ wrote: post #26
a9h74j wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caton in Overshoot called humans a detritus species. Your very descriptive paragraph might be mined for metaphors. For example, in place of a brain, does humanity have going a peristaltic action connecting mines to landfills?

Your username and comment make me think GPT3 wrote this. What do you mean?

Can we cut the 'are you a robot, captain?' comments please? They are just a small step removed from 'are you a shill' (or worse: 'you are are a shill').

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

#37

Post by froj »

tuatoru wrote: post #34
gumby wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are thinking of animals, JBS Haldane had it right: god has an inordinate fondness for beetles. But in the scheme of things, animals aren’t really that big a deal: > Of the 550 gigatons of biomass carbon on Earth, animals make up about 2 gigatons, with insects comprising half of that and fish taking up another 0.7 gigatons. Everything else, including mammals, birds, nematodes and mollusks are roughly 0.3 gigato…

> with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons At that time, perhaps. If average human mass is 30 kg, with 8 billion of us, we mass about 0.24 Gt.

In TFA they count 7.6B humans, but the mass is only the "dry-weight of carbon". So I guess the average person only contains about 8kg of carbon.

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

#38

Post by rbanffy »

froj wrote: post #37
tuatoru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with humans weighing in at 0.06 gigatons At that time, perhaps. If average human mass is 30 kg, with 8 billion of us, we mass about 0.24 Gt.

In TFA they count 7.6B humans, but the mass is only the "dry-weight of carbon". So I guess the average person only contains about 8kg of carbon.

“Ugly bags of mostly water” is how an alien in Star Trek once described us.

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

#39

Post by rbanffy »

iancmceachern wrote: post #20
grouseway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another cool visualization - with different figures however. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...

I always say to my wife - bugs rule the earth.

When I look to Jira, I have to agree with you.

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

#40

Post by rbanffy »

FriedrichN wrote: post #30
LenP wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This was a shock for me when I learned of this. It's a great way to show people who think humanity somehow doesn't have the capability to have an effect on greenhouse gas emissions for example. We have totally and completely reshaped the earth in a matter of centuries in what should normally take thousands or tens of thousands of years.

We are probably not the first species to do that. All invasive species reshape the ecosystems they enter.

And just now we are gaining awareness of how we can change the environment in a deliberate way.

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