Stream of consciousness: I pee many times a day, and way too many times at night. But I’m old, and that’s expected. I have a new puppy. He was about eight months old when I got him, and he already understood that he is supposed to pee outside. He can hold it for an amazingly long time. I tell him to go outside and go pee pee, and half the time he looks at me and asks, Why?
I know that cats pee because I’ve had several and spent many years cleaning the cat box. But what about birds? I’ve never seen a bird pee, so I conjecture maybe all their excrement is combined and comes out of one hole in splats, once on my shoulder. I’ve seen fish poop, but I’ve never seen them pee, so maybe they also combine everything. Maybe everything in the ocean combines their excrement and sends it out from one hole.
(Notice how far I took this hypothesis with almost nothing to back it up. Having later done a little googling, I found that I was correct about the birds, incorrect about the fish, and thus incorrect about “everything” in the ocean. I also found that excreting functions of birds and fish are very different from dogs and cats and humans, but that’s a different topic.)
Next, I wondered about whales. I’ve never seen a whale poop, and I somehow cannot imagine them peeing. Here, the stream of consciousness ended, and I decided to look for some actual information on the subject and googled “do whales pee?” Wow, get ready. This is impressive. The first thing that came up was that fin whales pee about 260 gallons of urine per day. This is more liquid than I have in my spa. With a little more reading, I learned that blue whales’ bladders hold 80 gallons. At a weight of 7.5 pounds per gallon, that’s 650 pounds, which is considerably less than .5% of their entire body weight, but still a lot!
And what does all this urine do? Whale (and fish) pee contains phosphorus and nitrogen. Plus, whale excrement is 10 million times more iron-rich than the surrounding seawater. Whales dive deep to feed and return to the surface to breathe (the “whale pump”) and migrate up to 12,000 miles across the ocean (the “whale conveyor belt”), stirring up and dispersing these nutrients that are needed to help corals and phytoplankton grow. Phytoplankton are microscopic creatures that convert light into chemical energy by taking in carbon dioxide and turning it into oxygen. They produce at least 50% of all the oxygen in our atmosphere. They are also the foundation of all marine life.
So, whales are essential for our oxygen. But there’s more. Phytoplankton (plants) are a food source for zooplankton (animals). Zooplankton are either larval forms of sea creatures (mussels, worms, fish, etc.) or they spend their lives as plankton (krill, copepods). Baleen whales are the largest consumers of zooplankton. (“Krill” means whale food in Norwegian.) (See one of my pictures: a feeding humpback here)
When phytoplankton die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean taking the carbon they have absorbed with them. Zooplankton rise to the surface each evening to feed on phytoplankton, then sink back to the ocean depths where their excrement sinks to the ocean floor, and in that way they also remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Further, whales themselves store carbon in their bodies. When whales die, their bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean, capturing the carbon in their bodies which can be kept out of the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years. One whale can capture an average of 33 tons of carbon dioxide over its 60ish year lifespan, compared with a live oak tree which captures about 12 tons over its 500-year lifespan. Our oceans absorb around 30-40% of all the carbon dioxide we produce, equivalent to the amount captured by 1.7 trillion trees.
So, the whales feed the phytoplankton with their pee and poop, and the phytoplankton create oxygen (which the whales also need) and feed the zooplankton which feed the whales, and the plankton and whales capture carbon. In other words, whales are critical for a healthy ocean, the production of oxygen, and combating climate change, and also for a robust krill population. When the whale population fell due to commercial whaling, the krill population also suffered because it didn’t have enough phytoplankton to eat.
Whale populations are rebounding from their decimation from commercial whaling, but their populations are still only around 30% of what they were pre-commercial whaling. Six out of the 13 great whale species are either endangered or vulnerable, and suffer from entanglement in fishing gear and nets, ship strikes, plastic and noise pollution, climate change, and ongoing commercial whaling.
But back to whale pee … I’ve read the estimated population of fin whales is tens of thousands (down from several million pre-commercial whaling). So let’s say there are 10,000 fin whales x 260 gallons of urine per day = 2,600,000 gallons per day. And that’s the low end, and that’s just fin whales. Think about how much oxygen the Earth must have had and how much carbon was sequestered in the ocean in the pre-whaling days.
Further reading: