Member-only story
The Animal That Feeds the Bottom of the World
And the top, too, if we’re not careful…
The news that a Ukrainian researcher in Antarctica had been arrested by Russian authorities for speaking out on the overharvest of krill came as no surprise to me. If you know even a little bit about krill, the vast trove of nutrients they represent and the importance they have to the entire bottom of the world, you know that it is a timebomb of exploitation in an overstretched world waiting to go off. The question always really was, who was going light the fuse.
I’ll back up a second and just explain the biology of it all. Euphausia superba, as krill is known to researchers, might just be the largest single species biomass in the world. Estimates put the total tonnage at somewhere between 300 and 500 million metric tons. Compare that with the 80–90 million metric tons that is the global catch of all fish and shellfish in the world and you can see what I’m talking about.
China, Russia, Norway, and a host of other countries would love to get their hands on all that food at the bottom of the world
Occupying a unique niche between phytoplankton and higher predators, krill blooms in giant pink clouds and effectively passes the energy of the…
