Badgers and Whale Poo

In a strangely redeeming way, marauding badgers and pooping whales are heroic.

In Idaho, where any form of life that competes with human hunters for game and grazing rights is shot on sight, badger populations have been eradicated wholesale.  So have wolves, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, foxes, feral cats and dogs, and any other "varmint" on four legs.  Consequently, prey species have run amok at times.

Currently, pelicans are becoming a nuisance at lakes where fishermen want to fish, dammit.  So what are they going to do to control them?  Reintroduce badgers.  I'm thinking that once pelicans are obliterated, the badgers will be escorted to the door and their furry rear ends booted out again.  So there you go, a redneck conservation plan, plain and simple-minded.

Next, we turn our attention to the ocean.  There, as you know, whaling ships have been prowling for a few centuries, taking whales for meat, blubber and various other useful products.  In the past, say, 40 years or so, the Japanese, and a few Scandinavian countries have turned whaling into a scorched-earth industry where huge whale processing plants, aka ships, haul in every whale they can get their hands on and turn them into cat food and sushi.  Yum.  It's still happening in spite of laws restricting catches to those needed to perform "research."

A worrisome new problem has emerged.  The oceans are slowly and steadily becoming more acidified.  Reefs are dying and other species like krill are struggling, badly in some cases.  The situation is now being studied around the world.  If the oceans die, we are dead, so this is a big problem.  One solution is to dump huge quantities of iron into the water to neutralize the acid.  It would have to be done consistently and repeatedly for years to come, possibly forever.  That could get expensive, you know?  No one's really happy with that idea right now. But wait, what about the normal balance of life?  What about what the whales' role is in it all?  

A few smart people sat down, as they do a few times a day, and one of them connected a few dots.  The solution?  Whale poo.

Whales and what whales add to the ocean -- poo (technically called feces, but you can also call it a lot of other things) -- exist in smaller numbers than they would if people were not harpooning them around the world on a daily basis.  No whales, no whale poo, not good, excrementally speaking.

Here's the simple loop that has been trashed by trawlers and whalers:  Whales eat krill, which are iron rich.  The whales digest the krill and then poop.  The poop releases iron into the ocean water that consequently neutralizes the ocean's acidity.  In non-acid water, krill populations remain robust and abundant, the whales have more krill to eat, they poo, the ocean is neutralized....and you see how it goes.

We are a species that is relatively new to the whole planet -- relative to insects, micro-organisms, fish and so on -- and we keep finding ourselves the clumsy kid in the sandbox.  We have barged around knocking things over, smashing the furniture, crushing everything we touch.  We keep discovering we've ruined things to a point of no repair or that we need to spend a lot of time patching up the stupid messes we've made.  Indigenous people who lived in nonindustrial times took the time to listen and look at what was going on around them instead of watching TV, so there was less intrusion on checks and balances in the natural world.  We don't do that, so we keep creating acid rain, acid oceans, dead zones, gyres of plastic and creating Superfunds to clean up after ourselves.  Here we think we are so darned smart.

So, the lesson is:  Whale poo is your friend and badgers would never have let the pelicans raid the fishponds in the first place if we had been paying attention.  Awesome.