There was a piece on RTE Radio 1’s ‘Sunday Miscellany’ a few weeks ago by Hugh Wheldon, a young Irish volunteer with the environmental organisation Sea Shepherd. He was aboard the ship ‘Allankay’, in the Antarctic, and talked of icebergs and polar sunsets, Cape Horn and Drake’s Passage, orcas and humpback whales, and the work he and his shipmates were doing, which all made me regret that I hadn’t done something similar in my youth.
When I was at college, the best-known organisation attempting to save the natural world was Greenpeace, which began in 1971 as a protest movement against US nuclear testing. A group of environmentalists sailed a boat to a remote Alaskan island where the tests were taking place. On the way, they stopped off at an abandoned whaling station, and what they saw was so bad, it made them think of the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia. From then on, Greenpeace started campaigning against whaling too.
These environmental activists are very brave – Grace O’Sullivan, former MEP and occasional contributor to this paper, was a crew member on the original ‘Rainbow Warrior’ when it was sunk by French agents in Aukland harbour in 1985. The French didn’t like Greenpeace protesting about their nuclear tests in the South Pacific. One crewman on the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ was killed.
Greenpeace still does admirable work, but some considered it not radical enough, and so in the late 1970s, Sea Shepherd was born. This organisation currently has a fleet of ten ships engaged in many different operations worldwide, to protect the sea and all its inhabitants. They retrieve ghost nets (those lost at sea that keep fishing for many years) and rescue birds and mammals caught in them. They are attempting to save the vaquita – the world’s smallest and most endangered porpoise (perhaps only ten left, because of illegal fishing in Mexico). They harass Japanese whaling ships, and highlight the annual massacre of pilot whales and white-sided dolphins in the Faroe Islands. And they monitor industrial trawling for krill in the Antarctic, which is what the ‘Allankay’ had been doing.
Not many people, even if they knew what krill were, would dream of spending weeks on a ship, unpaid, in the freezing cold and rough seas of the Southern Ocean, in order to protect them. But krill, though small, are extremely important animals.
They are crustaceans, belonging to the order Euphausiacea. In the crustacean evolutionary tree, to be very unscientific, one could say they are above the sandhoppers and woodlice, but below the shrimps, lobsters and crabs. There are about 90 species, all marine and planktonic, found in all oceans. We have several species of krill around our coasts, which are all eaten by fish, seabirds and cetaceans; when I studied garfish diet years ago, I found krill, mostly Meganyctiphanes norvegicus and Nyctiphanes couchi, in 22 per cent of the samples.
Most krill are less than a centimetre long. They resemble little transparent shrimps, but can be distinguished from them by their visible gills – the carapace (or ‘shell’) doesn’t enclose the gills, and so the animals have a slightly furry appearance. Also, their legs are all the same – without claws, but covered in long bristles, which form a sort of net for catching food, mostly phytoplankton (microscopic plants that float in the sea). Antarctic krill also scrape algae off the underside of sea ice, while some species feed on smaller crustaceans.
Krill are weak swimmers and like all planktonic organisms, their movements are largely controlled by water currents. But they do migrate vertically – paddling slowly towards the surface at night, and falling down to deeper water in the day. They have little organs on their ventral sides, which produce light, by a chemical reaction involving a luminescent pigment called a luciferin. The krill acquire the luciferin from the algae they eat. These same algae create the bioluminescence you might see while boating at night – the trail of gold flowing from your anchor rope, or the explosion of sparkles when throwing a bucket into the water. The same thing can sometimes be seen on a beach by the water’s edge.
Like all marine creatures, krill are having to live with human plastic waste. Researchers have found that they can digest plastic particles 5mm in diameter, breaking them down and excreting them back into the environment in smaller form, making the problem of microplastics even worse.
Krill occur in enormous quantities: the Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba lives in swarms up to 60,000 individuals per cubic metre. It is the largest species of krill, growing to 6cm. The average yearly biomass of this species has been estimated to be about 379 million tonnes, one of the largest on the planet. They are therefore of great importance in marine food chains. Whales and penguins particularly rely on Antarctic krill. The very biggest animal that has ever lived, the blue whale, travels thousands of miles every southern summer to feed on them; one blue whale can swallow up to four tons of krill per day.
As krill occur in such numbers, they produce enormous amounts of waste. According to a recent publication by the University of Strathclyde, krill transfer 0.3 million tonnes of carbon every day to the deep ocean – equivalent to the UK’s daily CO2 emissions. By eating and excreting phytoplankton, and regularly shedding their exoskeletons, krill are helping to reduce the effects of climate change.
Unfortunately climate change is affecting krill, by warming seas and loss of ice. And, of course, greedy Man has decided krill is just one more natural resource to plunder for his own profit, without a thought for the animals that can eat nothing else, or, of course, for the planet.
I lived for three months in Japan (the first of many unsuccessful attempts to start a new life abroad). Visits to the shops were always confusing adventures, and the seafood counter at the local supermarket was like a marine biology demonstration, with everything from seaweed and krill up to whale meat on display. I never did try krill (or, I hasten to add, whale), but perhaps I have unwittingly tasted it – krill is sometimes one of the components of shrimp paste and shrimp sauce, important condiments in south-east Asia.
The krill fishing industry has grown considerably since the 1980s. Japan, Norway and South Korea are the major countries involved. According to Sea Shepherd, last season there were fourteen super trawlers fishing for krill in Antarctica, each one pulling a net “big enough to engulf a jumbo jet”. They trawl straight through pods of feeding whales; three whales were killed last season. Most of the krill caught is ground up and made into dietary supplements for humans, or food for aquaria and fish farms (including those in Ireland). So whales, as well as penguins and other sea birds, are being robbed of a vital food source, and even killed, just so that humans can take unnecessary health pills and their farmed salmon have a nice pink colour. If you must eat salmon, ensure it wasn’t fed on krill.
If I were younger, I would join Sea Shepherd, but being an old-age pensioner now, and not a very courageous one, I can only write this in the hope that some readers might be inspired enough to get involved. Sea Shepherd is considered by some to be a dangerous, piratical organisation (its emblem is like the Jolly Roger, but with crossed trident and shepherd’s crook instead of bones under the skull). Many also disapprove of the disruption and vandalism caused by other environmental activists. But if governments refuse to halt environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, and indeed make both worse because they really only care about votes and economics, and if they don’t even enforce their own laws, then what else can be done?
Which brings me back to my main concern at the moment. Last weekend, the hunters were around here yet again. I actually saw them, through binoculars, trying to dig a fox, or perhaps a badger, out of its den. I rang the guards three times, but they never came. I wrote to the Wildlife Enforcement Support Unit, and finally got a response (I got none last time), but they just haven’t got the resources. I wrote to our new junior minister for nature, as I have done twice before, and still no reply. Perhaps a terrestrial version of Sea Shepherd is required.
