SALPs, an Athenaeum post

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2012/04/strength-in-numbers-the-mighty-salp.html

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Comments

[Maureen Lang]

Thanks for the link to my post, Pat. Diablo Canyon is my nuclear neighbor, so I've a keen interest in this news story.

[Fred]

That's a very interesting article. Seaweed caused a similar shut down of Crystal River Unit 3 when I was working there a few years ago.

[different clue]

If salps can eat all different sizes of phytoplankton and concentrate the undigested carbon into poo pellets big enough to fall to the ocean floor, then this newly discovered talent may give new life to thoughts of fertilizing large areas of ocean surface with soluble iron compounds to stimulate phytoplankton growth over millions of square miles. If ocean surface fertilization could stimulate the growth of gigatons of phytoplankton long enough to feed a gigaton increase in the numbers of salps; then a gigaton of salps could drop a gigaton of carbon-rich poo pellets to the bottom of the sea. That would take the carbon out of the carbon cycle for a while, and the dropping level of ocean-surface CO2 would cause more
airborne CO2 to equilibrate into the ocean and enter the phytoplankton for salps to each and drop more carbon. It could be a way to suck much excess CO2 back down out of the air. Maybe some research will be done to see if this could work.

Maybe a million years from now our distant descendants will be mining the ocean bottom for salpoo faecoal.