Prawns eat world-saving experiment
There you are, trying to save the world, and then some hungry prawns come along and ruin everything.
An experiment set up to help solve global warming has been undone by crafty crustaceans out for a good meal.
Scientists had 'fertilised' 300 sq km of the Southern Atlantic with six tonnes of dissolved iron.
This was to encourage the growth of plankton which eat up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, when they die, sink down to the bottom of the ocean thus preventing the global warming gas getting back out.
And it was all going so well until a hungry swarm of hungry copepods came along and ate the lot. Copepods are then eaten by a bigger crustaceans, who in turn feed quid and whales.
So the carbon lives on and will find its way into the air again.
By all accounts, researchers are going to carry on but their efforts have attracted some scorn, with some scientists saying to get it to have any impact on the greenhouse effect we'd have to transform vast swathes of the oceans into plankton farms.
So back do the drawing board then.
Weird Science Factoid: It is not possible to tickle yourself. So you'll just have to get someone else to do it.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
