SAN DIEGO — It’s a topic that many people would probably want to flush and forget. Yes, we’re talking about poop.

In this case, scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography took a close look at the fecal pellets produced by a zooplankton called salps. They examined the salp poop during a research cruise in 2018 off the waters of New Zealand to look at the creature’s ability to sequester carbon.

Moira Decima, assistant professor and curator of the Pelagic Invertebrate Collection at the Scripps, says the team captured the pellets in sediment traps. Then, they dissected the pellets, among other scientific things, to help the team calculate how much the salps were eating.

“When we went out there and we compared water with salps and water without salps, we found that the amount of carbon sequestered when salps were there was two to eight times higher than when salps weren’t there,” Decima said. “So, on average, the locations with salp blooms were exporting five times more carbon than locations without salps.”