With the advent of industrial whaling, those ecosystems imploded. Whales feasted so intensely that sailors would spot their water spouts punching upward in every direction, as far as the eye could see. Back then, krill used to swarm so densely that they reddened the surface of the Southern Ocean. They do this so well that even in the pre-whaling era their huge appetites barely dented the lush wonderlands that they seeded. They donвЂ™t just eat krill they also create the conditions that allow krill to thrive. Just as many large mammals are known to do on land, the whales engineer the same ecosystems upon which they depend. The defecated iron then stimulates the growth of tiny phytoplankton, which in turn feed the krill, which in turn feed the whales, and so on. Whales unlock that iron when they eat, and release it when they poop.

Much of it is locked inside the bodies of krill and other animals. But in the Southern Ocean, where ice cloaks the land, iron is scarcer. The north Atlantic Ocean gets iron from dust that blows over from the Sahara. The explanation for this paradox involves iron, a mineral that all living things need in small amounts. In the 1970s, many scientists assumed that the former whaling grounds would become a krilltopia, but instead, later studies showed that krill numbers had plummeted by more than 80 percent. Surely, then, the mass slaughter of whales must have created a paradise for their prey? After industrial-era whalers killed off these giants, about 380 million metric tons of krill would have gone uneaten every year. A blue whale might gulp down 16 metric tons of krill. Every feeding day, these animals can snarf down 5 to 30 percent of their already titanic body weight. But on the 100 or so days when they do eat, they are incredibly efficient about it. They fast for two-thirds of the year, subsisting on their huge stores of blubber. Using these devices, he and his colleagues calculated that baleen whales eat three times more than researchers had previously thought. And suction-cup-affixed tags that come with accelerometers, GPS, and cameras can track whales deep underwater-вЂњI think of them as whale iPhones,вЂќ Savoca said. Echo sounders can use sonar to gauge the size of krill swarms. Drones can photograph feeding whales, allowing researchers to size up their ballooning mouths. But new technologies developed over the past decade have provided better data. In the past, researchers either examined the stomachs of beached whales or extrapolated upward from much smaller animals, such as mice and dolphins. For these reasons, scientists have struggled to work out how much these creatures eat. They are also elastic: When a blue whale lunges at krill, its mouth can swell to engulf a volume of water larger than its own body. Those pre-whaling ecosystems are вЂњstill there-degraded, but still there.вЂќ And his teamвЂ™s study points to a possible way of restoring them-by repurposing a controversial plan to reverse climate change.Д«aleen whales are elusive, often foraging well below the oceanвЂ™s surface.

When the whales were killed, those food webs collapsed, turning seas that were once rain forestвЂ“like in their richness into marine deserts.Д«ut this tragic tale doesnвЂ™t have to be вЂњanother depressing retrospective,вЂќ Savoca told me.

Their iron-rich poop acted like manure, fertilizing otherwise impoverished waters and seeding the base of the rich food webs that they then gorged upon. But whales, despite their astronomical appetite, didnвЂ™t deplete the oceans in the way that humans now do. ThatвЂ™s twice as much as all the krill that now exist, and twice as much by weight as all the fish that todayвЂ™s fisheries catch annually. They calculated that before industrial whaling, these creatures would have consumed about 430 million metric tons of krill-small, shrimplike animals-every year. In a new study, the Stanford ecologist Matthew Savoca and his colleagues have, for the first time, accurately estimated just how much. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.ДЄll those missing whales left behind an enormous amount of uneaten food. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. Baleen whales-the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales-had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing.

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