Sea salps shall surely save society

[mistermack]

Sea Salps are a well known tiny animal, that reproduces asexually. Although they look a bit like jellyfish, they are actually closer to us vertebrates.

It's been recently discovered that they are playing a growing part in the carbon cycle.
This is because they graze on phytoplankton, but crucially, they send carbon to the ocean floor in their shit pellets, and their dead bodies when they die. This gets fixed and compressed, rather than recycled.

Because they reproduce so fast, they can create a swarm to match the vast algal blooms that have been getting more common lately, with the higher carbon content of sea water. They can completely devour a bloom, and effectively fix huge quantities of carbon in the ocean floor for millions of years.
One swarm can fix 4,000 tons of carbon in a single night.
I was just watching a BBC4 programme on swarms, and it mentioned them, and their carbon fixing capabilities, so I looked them up. :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp

Maybe, if the governments of the world are so worried by carbon, they should be seeding the oceans and creating phytoplankton blooms.
I've long advocated this for food production, but if you can fix so much carbon with so little seeding of the oceans, I can't see why they don't get their act together and do it.

Of course, that could pave the way for the next ice age, but, hey ho, who gives a fuck.

[Blind groper]

We already know that adding soluble iron to the ocean causes phytoplankton to bloom. Another interesting observation centres round the fact that iron shipwrecks seem to attract vast amounts of marine life, possibly due to iron (a vital nutrient) leaching into the ocean.