Starfish Suck Carbon From the Sea

t's just like the movie "Avatar" -- well, sort of. Starfish, sea urchins, and their brethren are rising up to fight humanity's greatest wrong to the Earth: global warming.

Together they are sucking around 100 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, according to a new study.

Lots of animals in the ocean sequester carbon for a living, right down to microscopic phytoplankton drifting in the water column. In fact, the tiny critters are so important to the ocean's ecosystem and chemistry that scientists have traditionally paid far more attention to them than other large groups of carbon-hungry creatures.

Take the phylum Echinodermata -- sea cucumbers, sea lilies, urchins, brittle stars and starfish are among the prominent members of the clan. For years no one thought they had a significant carbon footprint one way or the other, or they simply didn't bother to find out.

Fortunately Mario Lebrato of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science in Germany did. He sampled echinoderms from various locations around the Atlantic Ocean, dried them, cleaned them, and measured them for their carbon content.

"The funding for this was initially derived from my pocket because nobody believed in the echinoderm [carbon] contribution," he told Nature.

When extrapolated globally, he found the contribution is indeed significant. While 100 million tons of carbon is only a tiny fraction of the roughly 5.5 billion tons of carbon the Nature article quotes as humans' annual emissions, it's still significant. It's likely an underestimate, too, since Lebrato's method probably ignored echinoderm population 'hot spots' in much of the world.

Remember the climactic scene in "Avatar" (spoiler alert, even though the whole world has already seen it) when the beasts of Pandora come out of the forest to fight against the evil, intrusive humans? Here I picture millions of echinoderms trying -- trying so hard -- to put right the wrongs we humans are doing to the world. In the movie, nature wins.

In reality? They're probably to going to need our help.