A rather unassuming article about fish carbon popped up on Twitter today and I wanted to share it, because it makes rare reference to how animals defend against the impact of plants of animals.
This connection is so rare in fact, this is the first time I have ever read it in any scientific paper.
For reasons I’ve discussed numerous times in this blog (see here, for example), animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More is a difficult thing to comprehend. Wildlife isn’t widely considered to be the principle driver for ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More. And the idea that animals might regulate carbon and collectively help avoid climate deterioration is hotly debated, even among conservationists.
So it’s refreshing to see New Scientist publishing an article that at first, recognises the huge effect of plants. The article states that:
‘Almost all of the biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More on Earth is ultimately the product of photosynthesisMeaning how plants extract energy by absorbing water and using radiation from the Sun to combine it with carbon dioxide to create sugars. More by plants’.
The accompanying study published this month in Science Advances looked at fish biomass via the waste they produce.
The team found that, prior to the massive recent growth commercial fishing, almost 2 per cent of plant biomass was being cycled by fish. The rise of industrial fishing since, has halved that amount, creating an impact ‘comparable in magnitude to the impact of climate change on the ocean’s carbon’.
What the study is saying is, that fish are an enormous stabilising factor in ocean ecosystems. What it doesn’t say outrightly, is the absence of fish creates a surplus of plant energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More and this creates changes in ocean (and therefore atmospheric) climate – this caused a mass extinction of animal life in the Devonian.
In this paper, is one of the least known but most important connections between animals and ecosystems. It shows that science is slowly beginning to wake up to the importance of wildlife.
