A blue whale photographed in September 2010.NOAA
The blue whale is the largest animal on the planet. It consumes enormous quantities of tiny, shrimp-like animals known as krill to support a body of up to 100 feet (30 meters) long. Blue whales and other baleen whales, which filter seawater through their mouths to feed on small marine life, once teemed in Earth's oceans. Then over the past century they were hunted almost to extinction for their energy-dense blubber.
As whales were decimated, some thought the krill would proliferate in predator-free waters. But that's not what happened. Krill populations dropped, too, and neither population has yet recovered.
A recent theory proposes that whales weren't just predators in the ocean environment. Nutrients that whales excreted may have provided a key fertilizer to these marine ecosystems.
Research led by University of Washington oceanographers supports that theory. It finds that whale excrement contains significant amounts of iron, a vital element that is often scarce in ocean ecosystems, and nontoxic forms of copper, another essential nutrient that in some forms can harm life.
The open-access study, the first to look at the forms of these trace metals in what's commonly known as whale poop, was published in January in Communications Earth & Environment.
"We made novel measurements of whale feces to assess how important whales are to recycling important nutrients for phytoplankton," said first author Patrick Monreal, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. "Our analysis suggests that the decimation of baleen whale populations from historical whaling could have had larger biogeochemical implications for the Southern Ocean, an area crucially important to global carbon cycling."
The Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica harbors little human life but is thought to play an important role in the global climate. Strong circumpolar currents bring deep ocean water up to the surface. Huge blooms of plant-like organisms known as phytoplankton support populations of krill, which are still harvested in unprotected waters today for aquaculture and pet food.
To investigate what role whale poop may have played in this ecosystem, the study analyzed five stool samples. Two samples were from humpback whales in the Southern Ocean and three were from blue whales off the central Californian coast. The samples were collected when researchers out studying whale populations saw an opportunity.
"The nice thing, I guess, is that whale excrement floats," said senior author Randie Bundy, an assistant professor of oceanography at the UW. Researchers collect it using a net attached to a jar to collect the substance typically found as a slushy or slurry material.
"The hypothesis is that the whales were actually adding nutrients to the ecosystem that these phytoplankton were able to use, so they would bloom more and then the krill could eat them," Bundy said.
An illustration of the (A) pre-whaling and (B) post-whaling interactions between whales, shrimp-like krill (pink), and photosynthesizing organisms known as phytoplankton (top left of each panel) in the Southern Ocean. The decimation of whales in this ecosystem and coincident drop in krill in some former whaling grounds implies a large shift in the amount of iron available due to the loss of whales and thus micronutrients in whale poop (lower left).Monreal et al./University of Washington
Previous research had found significant amounts of major nutrients, like nitrogen and carbon, in whale poop samples. The new paper instead looked for metals that are in short supply far from land and are often a limiting factor for the growth of ocean ecosystems.
"In the Southern Ocean, iron is considered to be one of the most scarce, or limiting, nutrients that phytoplankton need to survive," Bundy said
Results showed iron was present in all the samples. The researchers also found another metal, copper.
"We were really shocked by how much copper was in the whale poop. We initially thought, 'oh, no, is the whale poop actually toxic?'" Bundy said.
Further analysis showed that organic molecules known as ligands attached to the copper atoms transformed them into a form that is safe for marine life. Other ligands helped make the iron accessible to living organisms. The researchers don't yet know the source of the ligands but suspect they may come from bacteria in the whales' stomachs.
Bundy's research focuses on trace metals in the ocean environment. This project began as Monreal's introductory research project as a graduate student but it grew into a larger endeavor as the results came in.
"I think animals play a larger role in chemical cycles than many experts give them credit for, especially when thinking at the ecosystem scale," Monreal said. "When I say animals, I really mean their gut microbiome. Based on what we see, it seems like bacteria in the whales' guts could be important."
Lead author Patrick Monreal, a University of Washington doctoral student in oceanography, stands in January 2025 on a ship in the Southern Ocean. Monreal's research shows that whales that were once plentiful in these waters may have also helped fertilize the water to support photosynthetic life.Madeline Blount
Co-authors are postdoctoral researcher Angel Ruacho, former doctoral student Laura Moore and former undergraduate student Dylan Hull from the UW; Matthew Savoca and Jeremy Goldbogen at Stanford University; Lydia Babcock-Adams at Florida State University; Logan Pallin, Ross Nichols and Ari Friedlaender at the University of California, Santa Cruz; John Calambokidis at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington; and Joseph Resing at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UW's Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. Funders are MAC3 Impact Philanthropies, the MUIR Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the University of Washington Program on Climate Change and the Ford Foundation.
