In the icy waters surrounding Antarctica, small shrimp-like crustaceans called krill (Euphausia superba) swim in swarms of trillions, forming a biomass larger than the entire human population. Scientists knew these 5-centimeter-long creatures could trap carbon from the atmosphere in the ocean floor, but were unaware of the sheer scale. New research has now revealed just how much: Krill can store at least 20 million metric tons of carbon in the deep ocean annually. This equates to $4 billion to $46 billion, depending on the price of carbon. Krill achieve this feat through their sinking fecal pellets, which preserve the carbon for more than a century. “Krill are super-efficient in carbon sinking, [since they have] larger fecal pellets than other plankton,” said the study’s lead author, marine biogeochemist Emma L. Cavan of Imperial College, London. She and her colleagues reported their findings recently in Nature Communications. An Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), about 5 centimeters long. Credit: Uwe Kils on Wikimedia Commons In the Southern Ocean, krill serve as an important link in the food web, connecting microscopic plants called phytoplankton to a range of marine animals, from penguins and seals to fish and squid. Even the humongous blue whales depend on them. They swim in super-swarms that can span ten kilometers in width and a hundred meters in depth—so huge that their nighttime bioluminescent glows make them visible from space. Cavan and her team estimated the density of krill in the ocean by using KRILLBASE20, a database containing 90 years of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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