The Animal That Feeds the Bottom of the World
And the top too, if we’re not careful
By Safina Center Writer-in-Residence Paul Greenberg
Krill “meal” at a logistics hub in Montevideo, Uruguay. ©Paul Greenberg
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.
Occupying a unique niche between phytoplankton and higher predators, krill blooms in giant pink clouds and effectively passes the energy of the half year of sunshine the falls on the Antarctic up to higher life forms. So exclusive and specific to its niche are Antarctic krill that the entirety of the Southern Ocean is often referred to as a “wasp-waist” ecosystem. Krill are the pinch-point of the wasp-waist. Below them is a treasure chest of solar energy in the form of phytoplankton. Above them everything from whales to penguins to icefish. Without krill to transform phytoplankton into digestible protein and carbohydrates, the higher lifeforms at the top of the waist would simply starve to death.
I came to know about all this when I visited first Antarctica and, later, a “krill logistics hub” in Uruguay while researching my book The Omega Principle. In that book I looked at omega-3 fatty acids in our bodies and in the world’s oceans. But more specifically, what the book led me to was a little-known behemoth known as the “reduction industry.” Every year, this multibillion dollar sector of global fisheries catches somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of all the tons of seafood caught in the world. While a sliver of all that omega-3 rich animal life is indeed boiled down into the golden capsules many of us take in the hopes we’ll prolong our lives, the vast majority is shoveled into the global maw of reduction and turned into feed pellets which are in turn fed to farmed salmon and other domesticated animals. For many years the reduction industry relied on schools of things like Peruvian anchoveta, Chesapeake Bay menhaden, and North Atlantic capelin and herring. But in the last quarter century, increasingly, Big Reduction is looking to the Antarctic and krill.
I won’t go into the details of that hunt for this last gold mine of animal feed. All that is contained within the chapter called “The Bottom of it All” in my aforementioned Omega Principle. Suffice it to say that Russia’s detention of the Ukrainian Leonid Pshenichnov who had been on his way to a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), might seem an act of war-time aggression. And surely it is. The official statement by Russia describes Pshenichnov as a “citizen of the Russian Federation” who “defected to the enemy’s side.”
But what it really represents is the tip of the iceberg so to speak. 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. To date, CCAMLR, a consensus international organization that has done yeoman’s work in protecting the Antarctic, has managed to prevent a giant global protein grab from taking place. But I am certain that behind Pshenichnov’s arrest is an unseen stable of horse-trading as nation’s jockey to make an end run around sounder thinking.
Keep your eye on krill. Whither it goes may determine how the world withers.