What do you get when you cross a whale with a Wall Street trader? A carbon credit. Or at least that's what one oceanographer's latest research indicates. Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the University of Maine, says that nursing whale populations back to their pre-industrial levels could help mitigate climate change.

"Whales are like the redwoods of the ocean," Pershing says. Blue whales can live for a hundred years or more -- and they're huge: a 100-ton blue whale contains nearly 10 tons of carbon. When a whale dies naturally, it tends to sink, locking the carbon away in the cold depths of the ocean. Commercial whaling releases carbon into the atmosphere, through the consumption of meat and oil as well as the decomposition of cast-off body parts.

Rebuilding the Southern Hemisphere's blue whale population from 1,000 to 325,000 (its pre-industrial size) would lock up as much carbon as a forest the size of Los Angeles, Pershing argues. Selling carbon credits for whale conservation could be used to fund monitoring initiatives and marine park management, he adds. "We need to use the markets creatively."