Study Says Krill, Which Help Make Up the Base of the Antarctic Food Chain, Are Moving South

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Posted March 22, 2019

Image credit: NSF photo

Caption: NSF-funded researcher Deborah Steinberg holds a beaker of krill during a 2017 cruise of the R/V Laurence M. Gould, off the Antarctic Peninsula

A study based on analysis of 90 years of scientific catch data from the South Atlantic Ocean shows that the geographic distribution of Antarctic krill has contracted nearly 300 miles southward in concert with ocean warming, according to a recently published paper.

“Antarctic krill are adapted to the cold,” said Deborah K. Steinberg, of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), a U.S. author on the paper. “Due to global warming, the habitat they can survive in has shrunk and moved farther southward where waters are still chilly enough.”

Steinberg, is also a member of the NSF funded Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research program (http://pal.lternet.edu), which studies the ocean ecosystem west of the Antarctic Peninsula. She added that “krill are central to the Southern Ocean food web as the main food source for whales, penguins, and seals. This decrease in the northern part of their historical range will thus affect this sensitive polar ecosystem.”

Krill—free-swimming, shrimp-like crustaceans—transfer energy and carbon from phytoplankton and zooplankton to fish, penguin, seals, and whales. So changes in krill distribution are of considerable concern to both scientists and those involved in commercial fishing.

The study was published in late January in the journal Nature Climate Change (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0370-z) and authored by an international team of scientists from the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and the U.S. Angus Atkinson, of the U.K.’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and Simeon Hill, of the British Antarctic Survey, were the lead authors.

Read more in a VIMS news release here: https://www.vims.edu/newsandevents/topstories/2019/krill_range.php