Bertie Gregory

Okay, there's a lot of nutrients in the deep.

Okay, got it.

Part of the problem is that at the surface, the place where the light hits,

uh it's called the photic zone so that the light has lots of microscopic plants in the water column near the surface the light's hitting them but they they lack some really important nutrients in order to grow okay so they have light from the sun but but they need these key nutrients so what the whales do is that they eat at depth

and then they have to come up to the surface to breathe.

And when they're at the surface, they can't poop when they're under pressure at depth.

They have to come up to the surface and that's where they poop.

So they have been feeding in the deep, eating all those key nutrients that is missing in the surface.

They then swim to the surface, breathe, take a big poop and they fertilize that surface layer.

So it kicks off the food chain.

The photon zone.

In the photic zone, exactly.

So actually you'd think, okay, if the whales come back, they're going to eat all of the krill.

But actually it's kind of the opposite.

It's like the krill, it's like this paradox in that the more whales there are, the more krill that they eat, the more they're coming up to the surface and fertilizing the surface layer, that creates more phytoplankton, the little microscopic plants.

The krill eat the phytoplankton.

So there's more whales and it just goes on and on and on.

So it's this amazing runaway train.

It's amazing.

And I could have explained that in much fewer words and much better, but you get the idea.