This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The companies fishing for Antarctic krill have harvested so much so quickly that the season had to close in August 2026, three months before it was scheduled to end. That's the second consecutive year of an early closing.
The fishing industry has said these developments are evidence that the management system is working as intended: Once the 620,000-ton limit, called a "trigger level," is reached, fishing must stop. And the evidence indicates that the krill fishing boats do stop when the trigger level is hit. However, as someone who has been studying Antarctic krill ecology and their role in the Southern Ocean ecosystem for 16 years, what currently concerns me most is how locally concentrated that harvest has become.
Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, is a principal food source for penguins, seals, whales, seabirds and fish. But krill are not distributed evenly across the Southern Ocean: They gather in dense, patchy groups in particular locations. They are most numerous in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula stretching into the Scotia Sea.
Breeding penguins and seals depend on high concentrations of krill found relatively close to their colonies because they must repeatedly return to those colonies to feed their young. If they don't find krill nearby, they can't go much farther into the ocean to seek alternative prey without risking their young starving on the shore. More than 30 years of observations from the Antarctic Peninsula show why this concentration of krill matters.
Models using those observations predict overall penguin performance—factors such as breeding success and foraging trip duration—to decline when fishing removes a high proportion of the krill available locally. Baleen whales are more mobile, but they depend on exceptionally dense krill patches to make feeding worthwhile and often congregate in the same productive hot spots. There is growing concern around the overlap between the krill fishery and important feeding grounds of the recovering fin whale population.
Perhaps obviously, those locations are also attractive to fishing vessels, because it's most efficient to catch large amounts of krill in those places. Krill meal is used as feed for aquaculture, pets and ornamental fish, among others. While some nations use krill meal as an additional food source for their people, human use of krill products is primarily through dietary supplements containing oils extracted from krill.
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