Two humpback whales were found dead and another seriously injured this year in huge nets used to collect krill for fishmeal and omega-3 pills near Antarctica, The Associated Press has learned.
The whale deaths, which have not been previously reported, were discussed during recent negotiations between the U.S., China, Russia and two dozen other countries in which officials failed to make progress on long-debated conservation goals and lifted some fishing limits in the Southern Ocean that have been in place since 2009.
Taken together, the whale deaths and rollback of the catch limits represent a setback for the remote krill fishery, which has boomed in recent years and is set to expand even further following the acquisition of its biggest harvester, Norway’s Aker BioMarine, by a deep-pocketed American private equity firm.
I find it hard to believe an organism as simple as krill can’t be farmed. Saltwater shrimp can be farmed. Nowhere near the ocean too:
https://faulriversideky.com/collections/shrimp
This sounds like something that’s 100% avoidable and could be replaced with sustainable practices.
Especially when krill are the only thing whales eat.
We may well be starving some of them because we won’t stop (or limit) the harvest of krill.
I wonder if it’s even cheaper to farm them? I would think it would be just because you wouldn’t have to bring them to the other side of the planet to process them. People stuck in their old, stupid ways I guess…
Farming has a larger upfront Capex and risk, anybody can drag a net in the ocean. Farmers are also very conservative folk, even factory farmers.
Once someone funds the first successful krill farm, hopefully some salmon or tilapia farm down in southern Brazil or Argentina, then everyone will copy them at scale.
Which would be awesome, krill is an excellent protein, should be efficient to farm, and we can learn to flavor it, make a whole new field of cuisine.
I don’t think they can be farmed because …
- Most krill are about 1–2 centimetres (0.4–0.8 in) long as adults (so can’t be contained by nets in the ocean like farmed fish are)
- The total global harvest amounts to 150,000–200,000 tonnes annually vs salmon at just under 190,000 tonnes — so they’d have to have massive land space for huge tanks to breed krill in
- info from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krill?origin=serp_auto and https://www.statista.com/topics/7411/salmon-industry/?origin=serp_auto
You don’t necessarily have to farm them on land, and you don’t need to use ocean nets. You can use fine mesh, and you can definitely get finer nets than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_aquaculture
So I think it’s at least possible to mitigate things this way. As far as I can tell from (admittedly not extensive) searching, it hasn’t even been tried.
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https://apnews.com/article/antarctica-krill-fishing-whale-deaths-04b2636cd800a40e69dde4e9868f992b
