Balance of nature illustrated: poop production (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, October 26, 2015, 23:45 (3102 days ago) @ David Turell

The loss of large megafauna has reduced the transport of many nutrients, especially phosphorus:-http://phys.org/news/2015-10-declines-whales-fish-seabirds-large.html-"Giants once roamed the earth. Oceans teemed with ninety-foot-long whales. Huge land animals—like truck-sized sloths and ten-ton mammoths—ate vast quantities of food, and, yes, deposited vast quantities of poop. -"A new study shows that these whales and outsized land mammals—as well as seabirds and migrating fish—played a vital role in keeping the planet fertile by transporting nutrients from ocean depths and spreading them across seas, up rivers, and deep inland, even to mountaintops.-"However, massive declines and extinctions of many of these animals has deeply damaged this planetary nutrient recycling system, a team of scientists reported October 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.-"'This broken global cycle may weaken ecosystem health, fisheries, and agriculture," says Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont and co-author on the new study.-"On land, the capacity of animals to carry nutrients away from concentrated "hotspots," the team writes, has plummeted to eight percent of what it was in the past—before the extinction of some 150 species of mammal "megafauna" at the end of the last ice age."-Comment: Balance in nature is critical