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Carbon Pump

June 14, 2018

This bell-shaped cluster is made up of gelatinous organisms called salps (genus Cyclosalpa). This kind of salp lives in sunlit surface waters, but other species migrate to and from the mesopelagic or twilight zone hundreds of meters below. Salps behave something like super-efficient vacuum cleaners. They eat by pumping water through their barrel-shaped bodies, filtering out plankton and other particles of food as they propel themselves along. Their fecal pellets sink—some to the bottom of the deep sea—carrying carbon with them and keeping it out of the atmosphere for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years. (Photo by Larry Madin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)