Antarctica's krill catch hits record high after China backs out of conservation deal
Antarctica for krill – a crustacean central to the diet of whales and a critical buffer to global warming – has surged to a record and is fast approaching a never-before-reached seasonal catch limit that would trigger the unprecedented early closure of the remote fishery.
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Russia ,
The fishing boom follows the failure last year of the
US
China and two dozen other governments to approve a new management plan that would have mandated spreading out the area in which krill could be caught and creating a California-sized reserve along the environmentally sensitive Antarctic peninsula.
In the first seven months of the 2024-25 season, krill fishing in Antarctica reached 470,400 tonnes (518,500 tons), about 84 per cent of the 562,400-tonne (620,000-ton) limit that, once reached, will force the fishery to automatically close.
In one hotspot, the catch through June 30 was nearly 60 per cent higher than all of last year's haul, according to a report from the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), the international organisation that manages the world's southernmost fishery.
The report, which has not been publicly released and CCAMLR said contained confidential data, was shared by someone concerned about overfishing in Antarctica on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to release the information.
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'The vast majority of the krill take is from an increasingly smaller area,' said Captain Peter Hammarstedt, campaign director for conservation group Sea Shepherd Global, which this year made its third voyage to Antarctica to document the fishery. 'It's the equivalent of a hunter saying that they're only killing 1 per cent of the US' deer population but leaving out that all of the deer were shot in Rhode Island.'
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