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Curzon
Author

Curzon

Date

August 14th, 2008

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Where are those whales when you need them!

plankton-hokkaido.jpg

An enormous school of plankton in the Pacific Ocean, photographed from space.

Comments to this entry

MTC
August 14, 2008
11:58 pm
Curzon -

It's a phytoplankton bloom, probably coccolithophorids.

Whales feed on zooplankton.
Curzon
August 15, 2008
1:12 am
Curse you and your science, MTC.
Aceface
August 15, 2008
1:37 am
But zooplankton such as Krill feed on phtoplankton.
And whales feed on krills,lots of krills.
MTC
August 15, 2008
2:08 am
Aceface -

Not at all. Krill feed on diatoms. A coccolithophorid bloom would crowd out the diatoms, leading to a crash in krill populations. The whales would have nothing to eat.
Aceface
August 15, 2008
3:01 am
MTC-

wait so is that what we call 青潮 in Japanese?
In off the coast of Hokkaido?
Curzon
August 15, 2008
3:20 am
Ace: I don't think so, referencing Wikipedia -- that may be a result of the ever-increasing ocean "dead zones"
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92%E6%BD%AE
Aceface
August 15, 2008
4:21 am
I blame the Russians.
MTC
August 15, 2008
5:41 am
Aceface -

Not the Russians, I'm afraid.

A bloom off Hokkaido would like be the result of unusually heavy summer rains in the Tohoku or Northern Kanto areas. The rainfall would wash fertilizers from the fields and rice paddies, as well as iron from the soil, into Honshu's rivers. The rivers would dump this rich brew into the Pacific. The overfertilized water would then be carried north, trapped in one of the Kuroshio's giant eddies, resulting a tightly bound bloom easily visible from space far off the Japanese coast.
Joe Jones
August 15, 2008
6:02 am
Damn, Curzon AND Aceface are being corrected! What is the world coming to?
Curzon
August 15, 2008
9:15 am
Joe, you'll be reassured to read the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton
"One of the more remarkable food chains in the ocean – remarkable because of the small number of links – is that of phytoplankton fed on by krill (a type of shrimp) fed on by baleen whales."
I knew whales played in here somehow.