A Slap for the Environment

A slap for the environmentalist or scientist who fantasize on environment friendly fuel and propulsion? No!. The slap we mention is, a smallish, barrel-shaped organism that resembles a kind of streamlined jellyfish, gets everything it needs from the ocean waters to feed and propel itself. And, scientists believe its waste material may actually help remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the upper ocean and the atmosphere

Now, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and MIT say that the half-inch to 5-inch-long creatures are even more efficient than had been believed. The researchers have found that the ocean-dwelling salps are capable of capturing and eating extremely small organisms as well as larger ones, rendering them even hardier and perhaps more plentiful than had been thought.

Salps capture food particles, mostly phytoplankton, with an internal mucous filter net. Until now, it was thought that only particles as large as or larger than the 1.5-micron-wide holes in the mesh.

A mathematical model suggests that salps somehow might be capturing food particles smaller than that, said Kelly R. Sutherland, who wrote the paper as part of her PhD thesis at the MIT/WHOI Joint Program for graduate students. In the laboratory at WHOI, Sutherland and her colleagues offered salps food particles of three sizes: smaller, around the same size as, and larger than the mesh openings.

“When exposed to ocean-like particle concentrations, 80 percent of the particles that were captured were the smallest particles offered in the experiment,” says Sutherland.

Other than figuring out slaps behavior, the findings have role in carbon cycling in environment too. “As they eat small, as well as large, particles, “they consume the entire ‘microbial loop’ and pack it into large, dense fecal pellets,” Madin says.

The larger and denser the carbon-containing pellets, the sooner they sink to the ocean bottom. “This removes carbon from the surface waters,” says Sutherland, “and brings it to a depth where you won’t see it again for years to centuries.”

And the more carbon that sinks to the bottom, the more space there is for the upper ocean to accommodate carbon, hence limiting the amount that rises into the atmosphere as CO2, explains co-author Roman Stocker of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering .

Since the consumption and excretion is quick, the smaller particles of carbon is rolled into larger particle by this process. Hence they sink faster.