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Eat Poop Die
Joe Roman
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It is not often you read a book by a man who has been following whales around and collecting their faeces for the past 20 years - a job that Popular Science magazine called one of the worst in science.
Popular Science magazine was wrong. On the evidence of this book whale poo is absolutely fascinating, and definitely worthy of study.
Joe Roman is an American conservation biologist and he reveals the deep significance of animal defecation - plus a bit of putrefaction. Processes such as the 'whale pump' and 'hippo conveyor belt', he explains, move vital nutrients around the world and absorb billions of tons of carbon.
The subject has long been overlooked. Perhaps we avert our gaze. Roman also believes that we have killed so many of the large animals that once roamed the planet that we have forgotten the scale of the ecological impact they, and their excretions, once had.
Early colonists in North America described rivers so thick with salmon you could walk across on their backs. Flocks of passenger pigeons countable in the billions. Herds of bison that stretched for 25 miles. Turtles that coated the sea. The cumulative effect of all their living and dying and defecating was profound. It was a giant circulatory system.
The arrival of humans, unfortunately, was the onset of coronary disease. By removing the big animals, as we did, we removed huge amounts of nitrogen from the ecosystem. Nitrogen is crucial for growth, and life. Farmers apply about 100lb of the stuff per acre in artificial fertiliser.
Some animals, astonishingly, provide more. Wildebeests move three times as much nitrogen from grasslands to rivers. Hippopotamuses shift six times that amount - Serengeti riverbeds are apparently coated in hippo faeces, despite hippos' apparent liking for flailing it around in the air, using their tails like helicopter blades. Even domestic dogs apply more nitrogen than farmers, at least beside city footpaths.
Whale poo, meanwhile, transfers nutrients from the ocean's surface, where whales feed, to its depths. Roman describes the stuff with appealing enthusiasm. If the whale has been feeding on crustaceans, it tends to float and clump into bright red succulent faeces. A fish diet results in something more subtle, a cloud of unknowing, like over-steeped green tea. As for female right whales, they sometimes turn on their backs while swimming, causing what can only be described as a shit volcano.
Whale carcasses are just as rich. A 'whale fall' is a bonanza for creatures living in the nutrient-poor deserts of the ocean floor. For deep-sea-dwelling snot worms, a whale is a buffet that might last for years. Even 70 years after a whale's death, Roman notes, 40,000 animals were found living on its carcass.
Roman focuses on large animals, but even the smallest contribute, such are their numbers. The largest migration on the planet is the nightly movement of plankton to the ocean surface. The sinking of their defecations sequesters more carbon in a year than that emitted by the aviation industry. On a more local scale, Roman visits a lake in Iceland where the midges swarm so thickly that they look like a wool blanket tossed over the landscape. Their tiny bodies add 120 tons of biomass to the land around the lake.
The only defecation that Roman steers clear of, or mostly, is human. He mentions the tragic effects of fertiliser runoff. He observes that human excreta amounts to 2 trillion pounds weight a year. He notes that if we saved our urine and used it for fertiliser, instead of flushing it away, we would each save 4,000 gallons of water and cut global production of artificial nitrogen by a quarter. As with large animals, the numbers really add up.
The final pages are devoted to the benefits of rewilding, but the book's argument is larger than that. It is a thought-through counter to the 'but whales eat our fish' line of anti-environmentalism. The evidence, he says, shows the opposite: large animals - from whales to wolves - create the environments in which other animals can flourish. We need them, not least for their excreta.
The book is not an environmental polemic, though, it is an enthusiast's account. There is lots of travel. Writing about Hawaiian coral-browsing parrotfish - four out of five grains of tropical sand are poop from parrot-fish meals, apparently - Roman goes snorkelling. In search of salmon carcasses, and their effects on forest growth, he tramps deep into bear country in Alaska. (In one experiment, he notes, researchers threw more than 200,000 dead salmon from one bank of a creek to another, to later compare the levels of oceanic nitrogen in the needles of spruce trees on each side. You have to love scientists)
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