The oceans play a major role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere. Recent research shows that deep-sea fish are a key part of this process:
Though we used to think that phytoplankton near the surface of the ocean did all the work of sequestration on their own, by taking their carbon with them when they died, it it now clear that the process is a little more vigorous than that. Instead of just waiting for carbon-laden plankton to get on their level, certain deep-dwelling, nightmare-inducing predators actually hunt down the tasty upper-level nibbles before swimming back into the extreme depths where all that carbon is effectively trapped for good.
And scientists recently learned that there are 10 to 30 times more of these mid- to deep-sea fish than they thought (and I made sushi jokes about them). Since these elusive fish turn out to make up 95 percent of the biomass in the ocean, they have a lot to do with why the ocean is so good at vacuuming up all our carbon.
But Stephen Leahy flags another recent study warning that as the deep-sea fishing industry becomes more intensive, we’re killing off this important carbon sink, which the report estimates is worth $148 billion a year:
When organisms die in the deep seas, pretty much everybody ends up on the bottom of the ocean, which makes for an effective, natural sequestration process. (It’s also the phenomenon driving ocean fertilization schemes.) The authors estimate that in the high seas, this amounts to taking more than 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere and burying it in the seabed every year.
The thing is, with fisheries impacted worldwide, more governments are subsidizing fishing operations on the high seas. More fishing activity could put a dent in the ocean’s sequestration effect, co-author Rashid Sumaila of the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center said. … In the new report, the authors argue that a ban on fishing in the high seas, which represent 58 percent of the world’s oceans, would be valuable just for protecting and enhancing their role as a carbon sponge, Sumaila said. But that is just one of 14 other valuable services the high seas provide humanity, according to the study.
The Dish 