A study in San Diego shows that a small animal can have a big impact on the climate.

A San Diego researcher believes that a jelly-like animal that lives in the oceans can influence the carbon cycle in the ocean.

Salps are gelatinous animals that feed on phytoplankton near the surface of the ocean. Species studied off the coast of New Zealand range in length from fractions of an inch to about five inches.

Salps can reproduce very quickly when they encounter a food source, and they are very efficient eating machines.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Salp pellets full of carbon, pictured in 2018.

“Because they combine swimming with eating, they can filter hundreds of liters of water a day,” says Moira Desima, assistant professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “(Salps) pull particles out of this water. Then they make these really big, heavy, fast-sinking fecal pellets.”

These pellets sink rapidly in the deep waters of the ocean, where carbon is virtually removed from the systems that transport carbon between the ocean and the atmosphere near the surface. This process is just one of the ways carbon is turned into a solid and deposited deep in the ocean.

“They are just delivered to the depths,” Decima said. “And the deeper they are delivered, the longer it takes carbon to be captured from the atmosphere.”

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

A salpa collected on a research cruise near New Zealand in 2015.

When salps feast on phytoplankton blooms, it can have serious consequences for the ocean. When animals find food, they immediately begin to reproduce first asexually, and then, as their numbers increase, sexually.

This rapid reproduction can turn the ocean into a jelly filled with feeding salps.

“Because of that, they can grow very fast,” Decima said.

And that means that this hungry little animal can really influence something as complicated as climate. The researchers found that salps can increase carbon sequestration by two to eight times.

“One of the reasons they can have really important effects when they are in an ecosystem is that they can cause blooms, which means they can achieve really high population growth in a short period of time,” Decima said. .

Gelatinous animals are not always present in large numbers, but when they are, they can affect the carbon cycle and the food web on a fairly large scale.

Salpa numbers in the Southern Ocean increased significantly between 1920 and 2000.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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