TIL: Whale Poop Freshens Our Air | Today I Learned

[Music] Did you know that every time you breathe you need to be grateful to whale poop? It's true! Whales dive to the depth to feed, and then they come back after the [Music] surface. As they come back up to breathe, they poop. When they poop, they bring out these limiting nutrients, and it becomes this fertilizer for these tiny, tiny, tiny microscopic plants called phytoplankton.

[Music] Phytoplankton use these nutrients to photosynthesize. When you photosynthesize, you're releasing oxygen. Now, 50 to 70% of the oxygen we breathe is produced in the oceans. Historically, we killed a lot of whales for oil, for meat, and as we did that, we changed the abundance and distribution of these whales and their fertilizer.

That's actually a problem because we need their byproducts. We need their poop to keep our oceans [Music] alive. That's why we call them ecosystem engineers, because their survival is so imperative to the functioning of that entire ecosystem and everything around them. So every time you breathe, you really have to thank those whales and their whale poop. [Music]