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Sea otters worth $700 million in carbon credits http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1278588047
Want to slow global warming? Save a sea otter. So says Chris Wilmers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose team has calculated that the animals remove at least 0.18 kilograms of carbon from the atmosphere for every square metre of occupied coastal waters.
That means that if sea otters were restored to healthy populations along the coasts of North America they could collectively lock up a mammoth 1010 kg of carbon - currently worth more than $700 million on the European carbon-trading market.... The figures are part of a growing realisation that predators play a crucial ecological role, promoting the growth of vegetation by controlling herbivore populations. Just as wolves benefit trees and shrubs by killing deer, sea otters allow the luxuriant growth of kelp by consuming sea urchins.
In former kelp forests that have lost their otters, Wilmers says, "all you are left with is piles of urchins and very little else".
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[Read more stories about:
predator depletion, carbon sinks, ecosystem interrelationships]
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'Doc Jim says:
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Are you crazy? We're not even paying them minimum wage!
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