A deadly race for krill

Huge whales depend on tiny crustaceans - but the fishing boats now want them, too

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T'S JANUARY 2022 AND A CRUISE SHIP OFF Coronation Island - halfway between South Georgia and the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula - finds itself among a 'superpod' of about 1,000 fin whales. Beaming expedition guide Conor Ryan describes how you can smell the breath of these whales, the second-largest animals on the planet. “It smells like rotten broccoli but it’s wonderful,” he says. Incredible footage from the encounter shows exhalations from the whales’ spouts firing into the air like hundreds of vertical cannons and thousands of seabirds swooping over the maelstrom.

The whales are feeding on a vast patch of Antarctic krill, a 6cm-long, shrimp-like crustacean said to be the most abundant wild organism on the planet, with an estimated biomass of 300-500m tonnes. It is the basis of almost the entire south polar food chain, and is predated upon by everything from fish and penguins to leopard seals and fin, blue and humpback whales. But there’s a darker side to this remarkable event. Other predators - humans, aboard a fleet of fishing boats - are also hoovering up the tiny crustaceans. These vessels harvest roughly 500,000 tonnes of krill every year to turn into farmed fish feed, health supplements and pet food.

For Matthew Savoca, a research associate at Stanford University, the story immediately planted a number of red flags. “It raised serious concerns about whether existing environmental policies for krill fishing are sufficient to ensure the long-term health of whales,” he says.

Those concerns are multiple – the most obvious being direct mortality of whales as a result of entanglement with fishing gear, and there have indeed been seven recorded deaths (of humpback whales) in the past four years. But that, though tragic, is not a conservation threat, argues Savoca.