> The study estimated that before that time, whales ate an unfathomable 430 million metric tons of krill every year, or twice as much as all the krill in the oc

> The study estimated that before that time, whales ate an unfathomable 430 million metric tons of krill every year, or twice as much as all the krill in the ocean today. The whales’ disappearance should have left a huge krill surplus. Instead, the opposite happened: The krill population collapsed by more than 80 percent because the missing whales no longer returned nutrients to the ocean in the form of iron-rich excrement that acted as manure, stimulating the growth of algae, krill food. TIL