Wednesday June 7, 2023
PEW Charitable Trusts —
Antarctic krill—the species at the center of the Southern Ocean food web—continue to face threats ranging from climate change to concentrated fishing. Some of the threats affect krill directly, while others could shift the predator-prey balance in the region.
Against this backdrop, leading Antarctic krill scientists met March 20-24 to advance their understanding of the species—information that will contribute to updated management of the Southern Ocean krill fishery.
The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s Krill Expert Group, with support from the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project, hosted the virtual workshop, which focused on developing a krill stock hypothesis.
In fisheries management, a stock is the portion of a population, group of individuals, or even group of populations, that live within a particular area and mix enough to breed with each other. The krill stock hypothesis will help scientists understand which segments of the krill population are part of the managed stock from the South Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean, which areas those stocks are using, and at what point in their life cycle they move between subregions. All of this information is crucial to effective ecosystem-based fisheries management of this vital Southern Ocean species.