Greenpeace - Making Waves: Ocean Fertilization ain't gonna save blue whales

Blue Whale

Several articles have appeared this week concerning a recent failed "ocean fertilization" experiment in the Southern Ocean - something which Greenpeace has opposed. Ocean fertilization, in case you were wondering, involves the addition of iron to the ocean oceans, where it is claimed to stimulate the marine food web, and to sequester carbon dioxide - in order to fight climate change.

Nature reported that "a controversial experiment which poured iron into the Southern Ocean has also poured cold water on the idea that such 'ocean fertilization' can mitigate against climate change.", while the BBC's Richard Black quoted Dr. Victor Smetacek as saying that "The Southern Ocean cannot sequester the amount of carbon dioxide that one had hoped".

But it got weird when Bloomberg published an article titled "Blue Whales May Get Boost From Fertilization Program" which made some bizarre statements along with quotes from Dr. Smetacek:

"The blue whale, the largest animal on Earth, may be saved from extinction with help from an ocean- fertilization experiment in the seas off Antarctica that has sparked growth of its main food source."

"Dumping a by-product of metal processing, iron sulfate, into the ocean stimulates the growth of plankton, which is consumed by krill, said Victor Smetacek of Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. Adult blue whales eat about 4 tons of the shrimp-like animal daily."

"'Fertilizing the feeding grounds is analogous to creating water holes in the desert,' Smetacek, who led a research expedition to the South Atlantic this year to test a theory that fertilizing the ocean can help reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, said yesterday in an interview. 'It's ecosystem restoration.'"

Smetacek also said "We have a solution to saving the whales -- why wouldn't we want to use it?"

Dr David Santillo, our Senior Scientist at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories in Exeter in the UK, was quick to respond:

"Such statements are a desperate attempt to claim some legitimacy for the increasingly discredited concept of ocean fertilization in the wake of AWI's recent LOHAFEX experiment, which has once again shown the claimed climate benefits of iron fertilization to be totally unfounded. There is no evidence that ocean fertilization will have any benefits for whales or any other marine species, just as there is no evidence that it will bring any benefits to the Earth's climate. Claiming that fertilizing the ocean with iron will help blue whales avoid extinction is disingenuous and appears to be little more than a last ditch appeal to public sentiment."

"The best thing that humans can do for the protection and restoration of ecosystems is to leave them alone", he continued. "We should instead deal at source with the myriad threats to such ecosystems from unsustainable human activities, including greenhouse gas emissions and overfishing. It's deeply misleading to try and convince people that it may be possible to 'fix' ecosystems by simply adding iron or other nutrients. Marine ecosystems are complex, and we should remember that we rely on them for our survival. Any attempts to 'engineer' them on a massive scale would undoubtedly have severe, unpredictable and possibly irreversible effects on marine life."

While we're at it, let's make it clear here is no evidence that the failure of blue whales to recover from decades of whaling is in any way linked to lack of krill, or that 'creating' more krill would do blue whales (or any other whales) any good. The whaling industry has, in the past, claimed (again without any evidence) that blue whales were starving, because minke whales are 'eating all the krill' as a justification for hunting minke whales (when in reality, the industry considered them the only viable species to still hunt). Antarctic blue whales are thought to be at around 5-10% of their pre-whaling population, so it's hard to see how there wasn't enough krill to go around before the whalers came along. Dr. Smetacek needs to a little more careful about his statements, no matter how well meant they are.