TIL: Whale Poop Freshens Our Air | Today I Learned

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[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]

AIDS 101 | National Geographic

Worked examples: Definite integral properties 1 | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

View All

15 Smart Money Moves for For Every Stage Of Life

When you’re young, you have time, you have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money, you have time, but you have no health. By the time people realize…

Valuation Modeling: Excel as a tool

Hi, welcome back! In this session, I’m going to break the mold; not talk about big ideas or companies, but about how to use an Excel spreadsheet I’ve created on valuation. Before I go further, though, there’s nothing magical about the spreadsheet. There a…

Variance and standard deviation of a discrete random variable | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

In a previous video, we defined this random variable (X). It’s a discrete random variable; it can only take on a finite number of values. I defined it as the number of workouts I might do in a week. We calculated the expected value of our random variable …

Balloons on the River - (Decatur - Sufjan Stevens) Alabama Jubilee

One two three [Music] four. Our stepmom, we did everything to hate her. She took us down to the edge of the theater. We saw the lion and the kangaroo. Take her down to the river where they call the wild. [Music] Alligator singing man overflow C the mudl o…

Ellipses | Punctuation | Khan Academy

Hello Garans, hello David, hello Paige. So, in this video, we’re going to talk about a piece of punctuation called the ellipsis, or ellipses in the plural form, as we have here. So, what is an ellipsis? An ellipsis is a punctuation mark that is actually …

Irregular plural nouns | -f to -ves | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello Garans! Today we’re going to be talking about the irregular plural. Previously, I had said that if you take any English word, any noun, say the word “dog,” and you tack an “S” onto the end of it, like so, boop, you get the word “dogs.” That’s how yo…

TIL: Whale Poop Freshens Our Air | Today I Learned

More Articles