Krill

A sea containing fish does not offer the same feeding opportunity at every location.

Krill present a different body plan.

They are crustaceans, relatives of shrimp, with a segmented body, jointed appendages, and an external covering.

Their swimming limbs move them through the water, and they can occur in aggregations.

In the 20th century, industrial whaling killed somewhere between 2 and 3 million whales, with most of the krill eaters gone.

So people expected the Southern Ocean to fill up with krill, but it didn't.

Krill numbers seemed to fall instead.

In 2021, a team of scientists put tags on 321 whales and measured how much they actually eat.

They found baleen whales eat about three times more than older estimates, and when whales eat, they also poop near the surface, where it can act as fertilizers for the ocean.

And the fact is, like, we don't just have a lack of blue whales happening here.

We have other things that are happening.

Krill face warming seas, shrinking sea ice, which young krill rely on.

Less ice means a darker southern ocean, soaking up more heat, weakened ice shelves, and the glaciers they hold back sliding faster toward the sea.

Krill, algae, and emperor penguins lose the platform their whole food web depends on.

The climate problem is here now.

There's a climate skeptic view from the Daily Skeptic.

Really? What do

they eat? They eat krill.

Krill? That sounds fun.

Krill.

They're vegetarian whales.

I don't like them.

On average, almost 70% of the study region showed a significant increase in summer phytoplankton over the past decade.

The researchers compared those findings to the numbers of tiny animals found in the water, krill and salps.

Krill look like shrimp, and they're a major food source for whales, fish, and other organisms.

Salps have jelly-like bodies, and they're not a major food source for any big ocean predators.

The change in phytoplankton appears to be favoring the salps.

That means algae oil is probably the safer choice in the long run, but you'll also end up paying more.

And then in between, there's even krill oil.

Krill, those are really tiny creatures, right? In the end, like marine insects, I just say, right? Um, which in turn eat the algae, which in turn are also eaten a lot by fish.

There you have a bit of the best of both worlds.

It's very bioavailable, um, still relatively clean, and, and yeah.

But there you have a cost issue again.

Krill is also super expensive, right? Accordingly, yeah.

So in the end, I think if you find a fish oil where you know, okay, there are certificates for heavy metals, they looked at, um, how the oxidation is and so on, that it's a high quality product, is the-- whether the content is right, then you actually already have everything you need, right? And then you're definitely safe.

Ah.

Because we were out of krill.

Krill's the fish, right?

Krill's the fish.

Yes.

Krill is a type of, uh, it's a type of shrimp.

That you may not know.

It's like-