The gorges of the tiny creature, fatty and locks the warm -up carbon of the planet

A tiny dark animal often sold as an aquarium alment has quietly protected our planet from global warming by undertaking an epic migration, according to new research.

These “unknown heroes” called zooplankton are threatening and growing in the spring before pouring hundreds of meters in the deep ocean in Antarctica where they burn fat.

This locks as much carbon warming planets as the annual emissions of around 55 million petrol cars, preventing it from further warming our atmosphere, according to researchers.

It is much more than what scientists expected. But just as researchers discover this service to our planet, threats to zooplankton increase.

Scientists have spent years investigating the animal’s annual migration in anterctic waters, or the southern ocean, and what it means for climate change.

The results are “remarkable”, explains the main author, Dr. Guang Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, adding that he obliges to rethink the quantity of carbon in the stores of the South Ocean.

“Animals are an unknown hero because they have such a cool lifestyle,” said Dr. Jennifer Freer co-author of the British Antarctic Survey.

But compared to the most popular antarctic animals such as whale or penguin, small but powerful zooplankton is neglected and underestimated.

If someone has heard of it, it’s probably like a type of fish food available online.

But their life cycle is strange and fascinating. Take the COPEPOD, a type of zooplankton which is a distant parent of crabs and lobsters.

Just 1 to 10 mm, they spend most of their sleeping life between 500 m at 2 km deep in the ocean.

In the photos taken under the microscope, you can see long grease sausages inside their body and grease bubbles in their head, explains Professor Daniel Mayor who photographed them in Antarctica.

Without them, the atmosphere of our planet would be much warmer.

Globally, the oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat that humans have created by burning fossil fuels. From this figure, the southern ocean is responsible for around 40%, and much of this is zooplankton.

Millions of pounds are spent worldwide to understand how they exactly store carbon.

Scientists already knew that zooplankton had contributed to the storage of carbon in a daily process when the carbon rich in animals run into the deep ocean.

But what happened when animals migrate into the southern ocean had not been quantified.

The latest research has focused on copépods, as well as other types of zooplankton called Krill, and salps.

Creatures eat phytoplankton on the surface of the ocean that develops by transforming carbon dioxide into living matters thanks to photosynthesis. This turns into fat in zooplankton.

“Their fat is like a battery. When they spend winter deep in the ocean, they sit down and slowly burn this fat or carbon,” said Professor Daniel Mayor at the University of Exeter, who was not part of the study.

“This releases carbon dioxide. Because of how the oceans work, if you put carbon very deeply deep, it takes decades, even centuries for this CO2 to come and contribute to atmospheric warming,” he said.

The research team has calculated that this process – called the seasonal vertical migration pump – transports 65 million tonnes of carbon per year to at least 500 m below the surface of the ocean.

From this, he found that the copépods contribute the most, followed by the Krill and the Salpes.

This is roughly equivalent to the driving emissions of 55 million diesel cars for a year, according to a calculator of greenhouse gas emissions by the American EPA.

The latest research has examined the data going back to the 1920s to quantify this carbon storage, also called carbon sequestration.

But scientific discovery is underway while researchers seek to understand more details on the migration cycle.

Earlier this year, Dr. Freer and the professor spent two months on the Sir David Porteborough polar research ship near the southern orche island and southern Georgia.

Using large nets, scientists caught zooplankton and brought the animals on board.

“We worked in total darkness under the red light, so we did not disturb them,” said Dr. Freer.

“Others have worked in rooms kept at 3-4C. You wear a lot of protection to stay there for hours both looking at the microscope,” she adds.

But warming water and Krill’s commercial harvest could threaten the future of zooplankton.

“Climate change, the disruption of ocean layers and extreme weather conditions are all threats,” said Professor Angus Atkinson’s co-author of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

This could reduce the amount of zooplankton in Antarctica and limit carbon stored in the deep ocean.

Krill fishing companies harvested almost half a million tonnes of Krill in 2020, according to the UN.

It is authorized by international law, but has been criticized by environmental activists, notably in the recent documentary of David Attent Borough.

Scientists say that their new discoveries should be incorporated into climatic models that predict how our planet will warm up.

“If this biological pump did not exist, the atmospheric CO2 levels would be roughly double of these as they are for the moment. The oceans are doing a very good work of cleaning CO2 and getting rid of it,” explains Professor Atkinson.

Research is published in the Revue Limnology and Oceanography.