Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #43 "Fishing in the Antarctic" with Matt Savoca, Ted Cheeseman, and Lucia Morillo

Transcript

Bad Idea #43 "Fishing in the Antarctic" with Matt Savoca, Ted Cheeseman, and Lucia Morillo · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

• 0:00
  Krill is also the primary food source for all Antarctica
• 0:04
  animals. So whales, Penguins, seals,
• 0:07
  seabirds, almost everything. It's krill as a sentence that we
• 0:11
  say that it's that in Antarctica, everything, it's
• 0:14
  krill, or it's something that it's krill.
• 0:16
  So all the food chains are really, really short.
• 0:19
  While it's true that the catch limit is 1% of the total krill
• 0:25
  biomass in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean, that's an area
• 0:28
  that's about the size of of Europe.
• 0:30
  However, imagine now all krill fishing just happens in Paris
• 0:35
  and London, but the denominator that you use to say, oh, it's
• 0:39
  only 1% is the entire population of Europe.
• 0:43
  Would that be the appropriate way to say that 1% of of the
• 0:47
  krill here are being taken every year?
• 0:50
  I think it's very misleading. This is arguably the place with
• 0:55
  the highest density of great whales of anywhere on the
• 0:58
  planet. This is a crown jewel in the
• 1:00
  world of recovering oceans. Welcome to saving the world from
• 1:06
  bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
• 1:08
  few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
• 1:11
  time to destroy GMO crops, and I also opposed nuclear power.
• 1:15
  But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
• 1:17
  Oops. I've learned the hard way that
• 1:19
  none of us are right all the time.
• 1:21
  So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
• 1:24
  often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
• 1:27
  it right. Hello and welcome to a very
• 1:30
  special episode of Saving the World From Bad Ideas.
• 1:33
  Today, I've actually got 3 guests for you who are together
• 1:37
  on a research vessel in the Southern Ocean near the
• 1:40
  Antarctic. So this is not your typical
• 1:43
  episode of the show, and I'm going to ask them each to
• 1:47
  introduce themselves and tell us what you do, and then we'll go
• 1:51
  on and have a conversation about some of the issues that you're
• 1:53
  working on down there in the Antarctic.
• 1:55
  So my name is Lucia Morillo. I'm originally from Barcelona.
• 1:59
  I've done my studies in Paris and I've been, I actually work
• 2:03
  for Sea Shepherd. I've been in Sea Shepherd for a
• 2:06
  bit more than a couple years and I am right now the science
• 2:10
  science coordinator of Sea Shepherd.
• 2:12
  So we do campaigns both in Antarctica but also in other
• 2:15
  places of the world. But just tell us what Sea
• 2:17
  Shepherd is, because I remember that they used to get in the way
• 2:19
  of whaling operations. And, you know, I think a lot of
• 2:22
  us are quite a fan because of just how hardcore Sea Shepherd
• 2:25
  was. What are you doing?
• 2:26
  What are you doing down there in the Antarctic right now?
• 2:28
  Yeah, so we stopped doing that. Sea Shepherd has changed a lot
• 2:31
  during the years. It's an NGO that started in 1977
• 2:36
  and since then he has changed a lot the approach that we have.
• 2:40
  But we always try to protect the environment, protect the animals
• 2:44
  and do so in the most effective and efficient way.
• 2:47
  So right now, the campaign that we have in Antarctica, it's
• 2:50
  mostly exposing the krill fishing fleet, but also bringing
• 2:54
  scientists, being journalists and giving them this platform to
• 2:59
  show the world what is happening here, far from sight and no one
• 3:02
  knows what's. OK, perfect, Matt.
• 3:06
  Yeah, Hi. Thanks for having us all on.
• 3:08
  I really appreciate this time and opportunity to to speak to
• 3:11
  your audience about the work we're doing here.
• 3:13
  My name is Matt Savoca. I'm a marine biologist.
• 3:16
  I work in California for Stanford University and the
• 3:19
  California Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
• 3:22
  And I'm one of the independent scientists that C Shepherd has
• 3:25
  been working with to try to use data to inform protection of
• 3:31
  this very special place where we are.
• 3:32
  Specifically, it's the South Orkney Islands.
• 3:35
  I'm sure we will talk more about that in the next, you know, 45
• 3:39
  minutes or so. But yeah, it's been really
• 3:41
  special to to bring some excellent collaborators of mine
• 3:44
  down here and to have Lucia here as the the expert on the Sea
• 3:48
  Shepherd side. But it's a really special
• 3:51
  opportunity. And thanks to technology, we can
• 3:53
  have a live chat as the boat is rocking and rolling around in a
• 3:57
  storm in a one of these classic Southern Ocean storms.
• 3:59
  So it's pretty exciting on our day off that we get to, we get
• 4:02
  to do this with you, Mark. So yeah.
• 4:04
  Fantastic and and Ted. Yeah, hello, Mark and all.
• 4:07
  My name is Ted Cheeseman. I am just up the coast from
• 4:10
  Matt. I'm at UC Santa Cruz, a research
• 4:13
  fellow there in the Freelander lab.
• 4:15
  I also previous career LED expeditions down here for a long
• 4:19
  long time since I was quite young.
• 4:21
  So in the last 10 years have made a big pivot.
• 4:25
  I'm Co founded a research platform and citizen science
• 4:30
  platform called Happy Whale, which is a entity to be able to
• 4:35
  identify your whale. So you somebody goes whale
• 4:37
  watching, photographs a whale, they can upload a photo to our
• 4:42
  website and we'll tell them who their whale is, both as a way to
• 4:47
  engage people in science and learn more about those whales,
• 4:51
  but also to get the data for these whales.
• 4:54
  And we've gotten a lot of data from the Antarctic.
• 4:58
  So I mean, globally, like in the North Pacific Ocean, we know
• 5:01
  almost every living humpback whale here in the Antarctic,
• 5:05
  depending on where we know a high percentage of the humpback
• 5:09
  whales. But out here in the South
• 5:10
  Orkneys, this is an area that's become really, really of great
• 5:14
  interest to me because it's a bit off the map and or rather I
• 5:19
  should say kind of totally off the map.
• 5:21
  But the few encounters that we've have records of have just
• 5:27
  seen this place at the forefront of the recovery of whaling.
• 5:32
  And all of this is in the context that last century we
• 5:36
  industrial whaling took out almost every whale, like way
• 5:40
  above 90% of the whales here. So it's of great interest to me
• 5:45
  to be here, a place that I've passed by for literally decades,
• 5:49
  actually like get to spend weeks here really understanding the
• 5:54
  the local whale environment, especially at a time of huge
• 5:59
  change. The whales are recovering and
• 6:02
  yet now we're trying to push to take out more of their food
• 6:06
  through the krill fishing industry.
• 6:07
  Indeed, and we'll get to talking about that and whether the
• 6:10
  whales that you're seeing in the Southern Ocean and you're
• 6:13
  researching are happy or not. But first of all, tell us where
• 6:17
  you are exactly. You you've mentioned the South
• 6:20
  Orkneys, what are where are you in in a way that people might
• 6:24
  understand? And what's the current sort of
• 6:27
  sea, sea conditions, temperature?
• 6:30
  What's it actually like outside? So, so you're saying that not
• 6:34
  everyone knows where the South Orkney Islands are?
• 6:36
  Yeah, No, no surprise there, right.
• 6:38
  So think a little bit of time scale here.
• 6:41
  Think back 40 million years, South America and Antarctica,
• 6:45
  the Antarctic Peninsula were all one body of land, right?
• 6:49
  With a with a basically a stretch in between peninsula in
• 6:54
  between that ripped through and a chunk of the land started
• 7:00
  moving E-40 million years ago. The furthest east of that is now
• 7:04
  the island of South Georgia, which is somewhat known because
• 7:07
  that's where Shackletons epic self rescue ended back 100 and
• 7:13
  some years ago and on the way in the plate tectonics a few pieces
• 7:18
  of land kind of fell off in what is now called the Scotia arc.
• 7:22
  So if you look at a map of South America and Antarctica, the
• 7:28
  Antarctic Peninsula stretches north and then curves east.
• 7:31
  And there's a little, there's a few dots of land as you go east
• 7:35
  from there. One is Elephant Island, where
• 7:37
  Shackleton's men overwintered while that self rescue was going
• 7:41
  on. And then another couple 100
• 7:43
  miles to east of there is a tiny little speck called the South
• 7:48
  Orkney Islands. That's where we are.
• 7:50
  So it's very much in the middle of honestly the most tempestuous
• 7:54
  ocean in the world, which, you know, fits right now.
• 7:58
  It's blowing sort of 35 to 50 miles an hour outside the first
• 8:04
  actually big storm we've had here.
• 8:05
  We've had lots of good weather the last week, but now yesterday
• 8:10
  and today have been pretty darn solid.
• 8:13
  And so we're staying inside the ship today.
• 8:15
  And, yeah, so basically a little island in the middle of what is
• 8:19
  for the whales, quite the opposite for humans.
• 8:21
  We look at this and we think, wow, this place is fearsome and
• 8:24
  deadly. The whales look at this as, wow,
• 8:26
  this is a place that generates lots of good food.
• 8:30
  Let's go there. So Matt, we just lost the
• 8:33
  connection there because you're on a on a ship and a storm.
• 8:36
  And yeah, I might need to repeat it.
• 8:38
  So I was just asking really what the research work is that you're
• 8:42
  doing. I know it's about Wales, but
• 8:43
  specifically what Wales? And what are you hoping to find
• 8:45
  out? Yeah.
• 8:46
  So as Ted mentioned before, this is a very sort of remote place
• 8:51
  in Antarctica and even folks who have been to Antarctica numerous
• 8:54
  times, like Ted for example, has don't know very much about this
• 8:58
  place, in particular the South Orkney Islands.
• 9:00
  So the South Orkney Islands have recently risen to prominence in
• 9:05
  terms of global, a global conservation space where where
• 9:09
  folks are really starting to pay attention because it is the
• 9:12
  epicenter of recovery of the great whales following their
• 9:17
  near total extermination in the 20th century during industrial
• 9:21
  whaling. And what we've seen is after a
• 9:25
  period of about 50 or so years, so from 19701980 until about
• 9:30
  2010, researchers, tourists, etcetera, folks that came down
• 9:34
  here basically never saw any whales.
• 9:37
  But in the last 10 or so years, whales are recovering.
• 9:42
  And nowhere is that more true than in this archipelago, this
• 9:46
  group of islands in the South Atlantic sector of the Southern
• 9:50
  Ocean. So here we have humpback whales,
• 9:55
  thin whales, southern right whales.
• 9:57
  We also are fairly confident there are a few Antarctic blue
• 10:00
  whales that use this region, minke whales, probably orcas.
• 10:04
  It is a really important area globally for marine mammals and
• 10:09
  for large whales specifically, though I think recently the
• 10:12
  stars of the show have been the huge aggregations of thin whales
• 10:17
  that have occurred in this region.
• 10:19
  So thin whales are the second largest animal on Earth.
• 10:23
  They can grow up to about 80 feet long.
• 10:26
  Off the top of my head. I can't do the meter conversion.
• 10:28
  I don't know. We see a dual meter conversion.
• 10:30
  24 meters. Yeah, you're up to about 24.
• 10:32
  See, This is why we have a European here to, to be able to,
• 10:35
  you know, translate on the fly about 24 meters in length.
• 10:39
  They can grow to be 70 or so tons.
• 10:42
  And yeah, they're the second largest animal in terms of mass
• 10:45
  ever to evolve on Earth. And there were about half a
• 10:50
  million of these whales in Antarctic waters at the turn of
• 10:54
  the 20th century. By 1970 or so, that was reduced
• 10:58
  to a couple thousand, maybe 1020 thousand fin whales.
• 11:01
  So they reduced fin whales via direct hunting by about 95% in
• 11:07
  70 years, which is approximately the lifespan of one single fin
• 11:10
  whale. Wow.
• 11:12
  Yeah, it is amazing. I mean, the the scale of
• 11:14
  destruction of this place is really remarkable and quite
• 11:17
  saddening. But what it did is it led to the
• 11:20
  Antarctic Treaty and other conservation measures to protect
• 11:24
  this place moving forward. And since those protections have
• 11:28
  come in place, that the recovery of the great whales here has
• 11:31
  been slow, but it's finally starting to accelerate.
• 11:34
  So in the last five or so years, researchers, the fishing
• 11:39
  industry, basically anyone who's down and spends time near the
• 11:42
  South Orkney Islands has found huge pods of fin whales, the
• 11:47
  largest scene in the 21st century are all from this
• 11:50
  region. In fact, the reason why I think
• 11:52
  we're all here is because in early 2022, so almost exactly 4
• 11:58
  years ago, we had a colleague aboard a a National Geographic
• 12:02
  Lindblad expedition ship and they came across a pod of 1000
• 12:07
  fin whales. And that is by far the largest
• 12:11
  aggregation that we've seen post whaling.
• 12:14
  So in the last 70 years, probably the largest aggregation
• 12:17
  that anyone on Earth has seen today.
• 12:20
  And these aggregations seem to be a kind of reoccurring thing
• 12:24
  in this area. So we are here to understand
• 12:26
  primarily what's going on with fin whales and fin whale
• 12:30
  recovery as this seems to be the spot where most of it is
• 12:33
  happening or the the most accentuated area in the whole
• 12:37
  world where this species is recovering.
• 12:39
  But also it's an area that there is extreme climate stress
• 12:43
  happening, warming seas, lower ice duration and extent, and
• 12:49
  also a krill fishery, a krill fishery that is expanding in the
• 12:53
  region. And we're interested to see how
• 12:55
  that krill fishery interacts with these recovering whales.
• 12:59
  But also, I think more broadly, we're interested in this area as
• 13:03
  a very special place to describe it, to understand it, to promote
• 13:07
  it to the world. Because regardless of whether or
• 13:10
  not there's a krill fishing industry here, this is a very
• 13:13
  exceptional place that is in serious need of real protection.
• 13:17
  Because it's one of those spots in the world that can inspire
• 13:21
  and change minds as to what our oceans and what our planet is
• 13:24
  capable of if we just leave it alone, let it be, and let it
• 13:28
  recover. So that's why we're here to to
• 13:30
  study the large whales. I would say primarily thin
• 13:32
  whales, but any whales will do for us.
• 13:35
  Lucy And maybe you're the right person to explain to us about
• 13:38
  the krill fishery. What what it is, what, what
• 13:40
  krill are for starters, because people probably don't don't
• 13:44
  necessarily know that. In fact, you know, I'll, I'll be
• 13:47
  honest, I don't think there should be any fishing going on
• 13:49
  in the Antarctic. I think we should let it leave
• 13:51
  it alone and let it recover from the previous horrific
• 13:54
  exploitation that Matt was just talking about in terms of
• 13:57
  industrial whaling, which also affected seals and Penguins and,
• 14:00
  and other species too. So what's going on at the moment
• 14:03
  in terms of this, this krill fishery?
• 14:05
  Who's doing it and and what do you think the impacts are likely
• 14:07
  to be? So yeah, first of all, you're
• 14:09
  right. Like the history of Antarctica
• 14:12
  and in the history of Antarctica, exploitation has
• 14:15
  always had catastrophic consequences.
• 14:18
  It happened with seals, and then they kept hunting seals until
• 14:22
  almost extinction and then whaling.
• 14:24
  So this has always happened in this way and we start to think
• 14:28
  why this time would be different.
• 14:31
  So waste krill. Krill is this a small crew
• 14:34
  station? There's krill around all the
• 14:36
  world, but in Antarctica there is Antarctic grill that it's way
• 14:40
  more abundant than anywhere else in the world.
• 14:43
  Krill is also the primary food source for all Antarctica
• 14:47
  animals. So whales, Penguins, seals,
• 14:50
  seabirds, almost everything, it's krill.
• 14:53
  There's a sentence that we say that it's in Antarctica,
• 14:56
  Everything it's krill or it's something that it's krill.
• 14:59
  So all the like food chains are really, really short.
• 15:04
  And what is happening now is that there is five countries,
• 15:08
  there's 12 vessels right now that are exploiting this
• 15:12
  ecosystem and they are fishing for krill, Krill fishing.
• 15:16
  We need to understand that it's not seasonal fishing, it's not
• 15:19
  out of necessity, but it's just a pure industrial operation.
• 15:23
  These vessels are not only fishing vessels, but they're
• 15:26
  also factory vessels. So they will fish at the same
• 15:30
  time that they process and produce the final product that
• 15:35
  will then be sold. It's a fishery that happens 11
• 15:39
  out of the 12 months of the year.
• 15:41
  So they never leave these waters.
• 15:44
  And it's sustained because we have at the same time that the
• 15:46
  fisheries fishing there is all these reefers and tankers that
• 15:50
  what they are going to do is they will come from South
• 15:52
  America, come to the Antarctica, refuel the fishing vessels while
• 15:57
  they are on the spot. And then they will also take all
• 16:01
  the product that has been produced on board.
• 16:04
  So it's there is no rest. It's fishing vessels will fish
• 16:07
  and fish and fish until they reach what it's called is
• 16:10
  trigger limit quota. So the the Organism that governs
• 16:15
  Antarctica has decided that 606 hundred 20,000 tons of krill is
• 16:21
  the maximum that they can fish. They will only stop once they
• 16:25
  have reached this limit. It's where it's called Olympic
• 16:27
  style fishery. So all the countries will come
• 16:30
  at the same time, fish as fast as possible because once the
• 16:33
  catch the limit is reached then they have to stop fishing.
• 16:38
  Ted, maybe you're a good person to talk a bit more about whales
• 16:41
  and what their life cycles are, how much krill they eat.
• 16:45
  Just just give us a picture of the the the way that sort of
• 16:50
  whale ecology works for these different species.
• 16:52
  And then we can maybe think through the implications of the
• 16:54
  krill fishery that in terms of what they might be on, on the
• 16:57
  whales and the whale recovery in particular.
• 16:59
  So these whales especially so think of it this way, right?
• 17:03
  We removed almost all the world's whales last century.
• 17:07
  Fortunately not to biological extinction, just a commercial
• 17:12
  extinction. And lucky for the whales, after
• 17:16
  such extreme exploitation, the products we were getting for the
• 17:20
  whales, which remind, remember, this isn't, you know, sort of a
• 17:23
  whaling. We will go Moby Dick back in the
• 17:26
  day where we were lighting cities with whale oil.
• 17:29
  This is most of the industrial fishing products, industrial
• 17:33
  whaling products were turned into like margarine, dog food,
• 17:38
  fertilizer. These aren't, these weren't
• 17:40
  things that were basically essentially critical for
• 17:44
  industry or social development. And and fortunately, the
• 17:47
  products that came from the whales actually were getting
• 17:49
  cheaper even while the whales were getting scarcer.
• 17:53
  So they went to commercial extinction, but there were
• 17:56
  enough left of most species that recovery began once whaling was
• 18:03
  banned. And those bands went into place
• 18:06
  at various stages. And there was some illegal
• 18:08
  whaling, but industrial whaling was basically over in the 70s
• 18:13
  and 80s. So really the recovery started
• 18:16
  in the 80s. So now we're looking, you know,
• 18:19
  roughly 50 years past the end of whaling.
• 18:23
  And what you have is a population that began from just
• 18:26
  a few percent. So it's very skewed if a a lot
• 18:29
  of young animals and not many older animals.
• 18:33
  And I, I think of it not just as numbers, but also culture.
• 18:37
  These are animals with large brains and fairly complex
• 18:43
  behavior. And there's a lot of learned
• 18:45
  feeding behavior. So if you think about a
• 18:47
  population that was removed, like 90, say 6%, just four or
• 18:52
  five animals left per 100, there were a lot of there was a lot of
• 18:56
  knowledge that was literally lost.
• 18:58
  And in some of the cases, it's literally lost where to feed.
• 19:02
  So for South Georgia, for example, when the whalers first
• 19:05
  showed up there, the first few years of whaling were entirely
• 19:09
  within the bays of South Georgia.
• 19:12
  Those bays don't have whales because those whales that knew
• 19:17
  about those bays are gone and didn't pass it on to their next
• 19:21
  generation. But so here what we've seen is
• 19:24
  hundreds of fin whales, hundreds of blue whales, each of these
• 19:27
  animals, these are the largest creatures on the planet.
• 19:31
  We haven't seen any blue whales, which are the single largest.
• 19:35
  But humpback whales, blue whales, they're going to eat 2
• 19:40
  to 5 tons of krill a day. And the reason, one reason they
• 19:44
  eat so much, of course, is because they're large.
• 19:46
  But the other is that they don't eat during their breeding
• 19:50
  season. The humpback whales, which we
• 19:52
  know the behavior of quite well. The whales we see here are
• 19:55
  mostly migrating up to Brazil, some of them up the West Coast
• 19:59
  of South America, like to Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, to
• 20:04
  breed. And they won't eat for four
• 20:06
  months at a time. So they're basically packing on
• 20:10
  fat to carry it with them and then deliver their calves and
• 20:16
  mate. And so really amazing biology
• 20:20
  it, it makes me hungry just to think about it.
• 20:22
  This animal. Imagine for all the moms out
• 20:26
  there, imagine that you're nursing your baby, your baby's
• 20:30
  growing, you know, 35 kilos, sixty, 7080 lbs a day.
• 20:37
  Your baby's growing an inch a day, 2cm a day, while you're
• 20:41
  losing 100 kilos a day, you know, £200 a day just to just to
• 20:47
  keep that energy flowing. So they have to pack on.
• 20:50
  They're completely dependent on packing on all this food here.
• 20:55
  And what? And the dynamic that we're
• 20:57
  seeing is, OK, these whales are actively feeding, but they're
• 21:00
  literally feeding within, you know, a rifle shot of krill
• 21:05
  fishing vessels. And each of those vessels are
• 21:08
  taking as much food on a daily basis AS100200 the most
• 21:13
  efficient of them, 4 or 500 whales worth of food a day.
• 21:18
  So it's, it's, it's structured for conflict.
• 21:21
  And we're trying to understand the dynamics of it, find out how
• 21:25
  many whales there are, their age structure.
• 21:28
  Is it in fact, what we think we're seeing that is many more
• 21:32
  younger animals, you know, a, a recovering population.
• 21:37
  And how does that intersect with the krill fishery?
• 21:40
  Thanks. And in terms of the conflict, I
• 21:42
  did a report which I think I've sent through to to you Matt,
• 21:45
  looking at some of the potential numbers in terms of the amount
• 21:49
  of krill that is being extracted by the industry.
• 21:53
  And for their 620,000 tons, it was something like 800 blue
• 21:57
  whales and hundreds of thousands of seals and potentially the
• 22:01
  entire daily Penguin chick population 4 times over.
• 22:04
  So this is potentially having a big impact, but let's establish
• 22:09
  the context, context of this a bit, Matt, in terms of the
• 22:12
  recovery of the whales, because you would expect logically, with
• 22:16
  all of the whales being removed, the krill population would have
• 22:19
  gone crazy and expanded enormously.
• 22:22
  But actually that doesn't seem to have been the case.
• 22:23
  So explain to us about how the kind of ecological dynamics
• 22:28
  works in the Southern Ocean. Yeah, the the history of the
• 22:30
  ecosystem is really interesting. And what you referenced, what
• 22:33
  you mentioned is something that we call the krill paradox, which
• 22:36
  is, you know, paradox is just when something unexpected
• 22:39
  happens. And something really unexpected
• 22:41
  happened here in the late 20th century after whaling.
• 22:45
  And so after whaling, when we removed 2 to 3,000,000 whales,
• 22:49
  which for most populations was well over 90% of their total
• 22:53
  population size, while whales were and again are the large,
• 22:59
  they're just both in terms of individually, but also in terms
• 23:02
  of their population prey requirements, the largest
• 23:05
  predators of krill in this ecosystem, right.
• 23:08
  And so once we extinguished that largest predator by and cut
• 23:14
  their populations down by 95%, Antarctic blue whales down by
• 23:18
  99.8% from 300,000 animals to less than a few thousand in
• 23:25
  about 60 years of hunting them. Well, the general paradigm in
• 23:30
  ecology, and it's not a particularly challenging thing
• 23:33
  to consider, is that when you remove the predator, presumably
• 23:37
  the prey would explode in numbers.
• 23:40
  And one thing that surprised scientists is that in the later
• 23:43
  part of the 20th century, when we expected krill to explode in
• 23:48
  numbers or the other krill predators to explode in numbers,
• 23:51
  that hasn't really happened. There's a lot of nuance around
• 23:55
  this point, which, you know, we don't need to belabor here.
• 23:57
  But generally speaking, we expected the krill stock to boom
• 24:02
  in its productivity, to multiply to maybe levels that we've never
• 24:06
  before seen. But in fact, in certain areas
• 24:10
  and overall, I'd say the opposite has happened, which is
• 24:13
  to say there's still a lot of krill in the Southern Ocean and
• 24:16
  around Antarctica where we are, but it's not the full explosion
• 24:20
  that we were expecting. And one of the reasons why we
• 24:22
  think that is, is because whales act as ecosystem engineers
• 24:27
  through I think of a large whale, thin whale or blue whale
• 24:30
  as a mobile krill processing plant.
• 24:33
  So krill are full of nutrients that they get from what they
• 24:36
  eat, which is primarily phytoplankton, but also other
• 24:39
  zooplankton as well. But those nutrients are
• 24:42
  primarily locked inside the krill bodies.
• 24:44
  They can't be used by phytoplankton, by the marine
• 24:47
  plants. And So what the whales
• 24:49
  ecological role or one of their ecological roles was to ingest
• 24:54
  tons of krill per day and excrete a lot of excess
• 24:57
  nutrients that the whales, you know, didn't need to, to grow
• 25:00
  their own bodies and fuel their own migrations and breeding.
• 25:04
  And that sort of recycling of energy and nutrients through the
• 25:08
  system over and over again, we think promoted the productivity
• 25:13
  of this system to peaks that were around about a century ago.
• 25:17
  But once we removed all the whales, you kind of pulled the
• 25:20
  plug on that ecological mutualism.
• 25:23
  The way I think of it is almost like a car having a dead
• 25:25
  battery. And now with the whales
• 25:27
  recovering, we're seeing that battery of that ecosystem jump
• 25:31
  start and hopefully the ecosystem recover as a whole.
• 25:34
  But the bigger pattern with krill and the bigger concern
• 25:37
  with krill is that krill are very, very dependent on sea ice
• 25:42
  when they're young to protect themselves from predators at
• 25:45
  those early and very sensitive stages to eat algae that layers
• 25:50
  underneath the sea ice. And without persistent and long
• 25:53
  duration and extent of sea ice, krill populations do not do as
• 25:58
  well. They don't breed as well.
• 26:00
  They don't recruit into the adult population as well, and so
• 26:03
  on. So what scientists have seen,
• 26:05
  now that we have identified that krill hasn't had this explosion
• 26:09
  that we expected after we remove the whales, we're now starting
• 26:13
  to probe why we are not seeing that.
• 26:16
  And generally speaking, the answer is climate change, right?
• 26:20
  Generally speaking, in the the northernmost reaches, so around
• 26:23
  South Georgia Island that we've mentioned several times in our
• 26:26
  conversation already, South Georgia Island is kind of at the
• 26:29
  northernmost extent of this ecosystem.
• 26:33
  As a result, it's also the region where ice duration has an
• 26:37
  extent has reduced over the over the last 50 or so years the
• 26:41
  most. As a result, what the scientific
• 26:44
  community has documented is a near total collapse of the
• 26:48
  breeding krill stock around those northern reaches of South
• 26:51
  Georgia Island. And we see the krill population
• 26:55
  and breeding center like where the where the krill lay eggs,
• 26:59
  where those eggs reproduce to make more krill has contracted
• 27:03
  toward the South Pole, so contracted southward.
• 27:06
  We see this all the time in in fish in the northern hemisphere
• 27:09
  contracting pole word, birds in the northern and Southern
• 27:11
  hemisphere spheres contracting pole word with climate change
• 27:15
  and krill are no different. They're also contracting pole
• 27:18
  word. So in the northern parts of the
• 27:20
  Southern Ocean, krill reproduction and recruitment
• 27:24
  and, you know, population building is really diminishing.
• 27:28
  Whereas we are now in the southern part of the krills
• 27:31
  range, we're like in one of the few remaining krill strongholds
• 27:36
  on the planet. And so this is an area where
• 27:38
  krill reproduction is still strong, krill recruitment is
• 27:41
  still strong. The population is still doing
• 27:43
  quite well, but it's a tenuous, it's a tenuous level.
• 27:46
  You know, it's, it's something that we can easily sort of turn
• 27:49
  the knob on climate change a little bit or turn the knob on
• 27:52
  krill fishing a little bit. And that tenuous population of
• 27:55
  krill could, could quickly turn in a bad way and start
• 28:00
  declining. So that's what I think we're
• 28:02
  we're most concerned about is what these big broad trends.
• 28:04
  And then the moral question of on top of that, do we need to be
• 28:10
  fishing for krill? Do we need to be adding another
• 28:13
  anthropogenic stress to this ecosystem as it's recovering, as
• 28:17
  we've identified these southern reaches as the epicenter of
• 28:21
  whale recovery and one of the last strongholds of krill in in
• 28:25
  the Atlantic side of the Southern Ocean.
• 28:27
  So that's sort of a long way to say that krill is doing OK
• 28:31
  depending on where you are, but it's very, very dependent on
• 28:34
  what's happening with the climate.
• 28:36
  And it might be the case where we're at a tipping point that we
• 28:40
  don't actually know we're about to step over in terms of krill
• 28:44
  exploitation and fishing until it's already too late.
• 28:47
  So we got to behave really carefully and really cautiously
• 28:50
  if we want to maintain krill in this ecosystem.
• 28:52
  Lisa, I'd love to hear a bit more from the Sea Shepherd
• 28:56
  perspective about the krill fishing industry and in
• 28:59
  particular. Yeah, we plan it just doing a
• 29:02
  campaign to against the Marine Stewardship Council, which is in
• 29:05
  the process of recertifying the cruel fishery with its blue
• 29:08
  sustainability tick. Do you think that the cruel
• 29:13
  fishery is sustainable? And talk to us about what you've
• 29:16
  seen actually out there in the ocean.
• 29:19
  So Sea Shepherds started coming to Antarctica to face the cruel
• 29:23
  fishing fleet four years ago. So we have done this campaign
• 29:26
  already four years and at the beginning the main goal was to
• 29:30
  expose the Cray fishing field. Cray fishing happens in sort of
• 29:34
  two different areas during the beginning of the year.
• 29:37
  They are in Coronation Island, the South Orkneys, where we are
• 29:40
  right now, there is no one here. They're able to fish non-stop
• 29:44
  and no one will see them. And then when the tourist season
• 29:47
  finishes in the peninsula, then they will go to the Antarctic
• 29:50
  Peninsula and fish over there. So they always use these to fish
• 29:55
  outside the view of anyone. Something that, for example,
• 29:58
  happened last year is that because there was so much ice in
• 30:00
  Coronation Island, they had to start fishing in the peninsula
• 30:03
  way earlier because they need to be fishing 11 months.
• 30:07
  And then when the cruiser saw that they, there was a lot of
• 30:11
  backlash because people were saying, how are you fishing in
• 30:14
  Antarctica? How are you fishing in this
• 30:16
  extremely protected environment in which all exploitation is
• 30:20
  forbidden except for the exploitation of marine living
• 30:23
  resources? So from Sea Shepherd, from the
• 30:26
  beginning, what we wanted to do is to expose the crayfishing
• 30:29
  fleet. We came the first year and we
• 30:31
  released all these never seen images of the crayfishing fleet
• 30:35
  fishing next to humbug whales, next to Finn whales in these
• 30:40
  extremely beautiful environments.
• 30:43
  And the, the public reacted very good because everyone was
• 30:46
  wondering how, how is this even possible?
• 30:49
  So we did these for two campaigns.
• 30:51
  And then on our third campaign, we realized that we needed to
• 30:55
  push a bit forward. We had already been using the
• 30:57
  Allen case. So our vessel as a platform for
• 31:00
  journalists and experts and people to like spread the
• 31:03
  message that this was happening because no one was against it,
• 31:06
  because no one knew this existed.
• 31:09
  And already last year with Carmela and Meher that were two
• 31:11
  scientists that work with math, we started the science project
• 31:15
  and we started to try to understand what is the real
• 31:18
  impact of krill fishing into the wildlife, What is happening with
• 31:22
  whales. Because it's not only the the
• 31:26
  grand scale changes, it's not only that they're taking away
• 31:29
  the food from whales. How it is affecting the whales
• 31:32
  and pregnancy rates and the overall body health is not only
• 31:36
  that, but it's also how these whales are starting to interact
• 31:39
  with the krill fishing fleet. And also the other way around,
• 31:42
  because things that we have been able to observe because we have
• 31:45
  been spending a month every year in Antarctica, is that still
• 31:50
  fishing vessels will use whales to detect krill swarms.
• 31:54
  They have this incredible technology.
• 31:56
  They have even like small drones that they will deploy so they
• 31:59
  can find the krill swarms. But also once they spot a pot of
• 32:04
  whales feeding, they will go over there because whales are
• 32:07
  the best, like the best indicators.
• 32:10
  Exactly. They're the best indicator of
• 32:12
  grill in a certain area. So we have seen grill fishing
• 32:15
  vessels spotting whales and turning towards those whales.
• 32:19
  Well, is that sustainable? Is that's the question.
• 32:21
  Should the MSC be giving its blue tick to this this this
• 32:24
  style of fishing? From Sea Shepherd we have a very
• 32:26
  clear opinion that the answer is no, there is no way.
• 32:29
  And once you have seen cluel fishing vessels being 1m away
• 32:34
  from whales, whales following the Nets of a cluel fishing
• 32:38
  vessel, because we still don't know the reason, but swimming
• 32:41
  around the Nets over and over for hours and hours, once you
• 32:45
  see huge tankers, reefers, krill fishing vessels all in
• 32:50
  Antarctica, for us, there is no debate.
• 32:53
  This is not sustainable. What happens with MSC, their
• 32:56
  certifications, which reasons do they need to say that it's
• 33:00
  sustainable? It's just completely biased
• 33:02
  because the krill fishing fleet will say we will only fish 1% of
• 33:06
  the overall krill that there is in Antarctica.
• 33:09
  But what we're seeing is that this fishing happens in exactly
• 33:12
  the same places where whales are, where Penguins are.
• 33:16
  And if there's a the wildlife hotspot of feeding is because
• 33:19
  that's the place they need and that's where there's going to be
• 33:21
  more Creole and that's where the clear fishing fleet is going to
• 33:24
  be. So there cannot be sustainable
• 33:26
  if even if it's 1%, it's the 1% that the whales need.
• 33:30
  Right. And who's actually responsible?
• 33:32
  I don't mind who answers this question, whoever's best
• 33:34
  position, really. But who's responsible for, for,
• 33:38
  for deciding what What level of krill fishing is is permitted,
• 33:43
  and which countries should, should, should, should be able
• 33:46
  to take as much catch as they like?
• 33:48
  Yeah. So there are a bunch of
• 33:51
  fisheries biologists that are, you know, contracted to do this
• 33:55
  type of work to estimate what is the amount of krill that can be
• 34:00
  reasonably removed from the population and have the krill
• 34:04
  population recover or not affect the krill population in any
• 34:08
  significant way moving forward. And I think that gets to this
• 34:13
  nuanced definition of sustainability or this is really
• 34:16
  what the conversation is about. So your question perhaps
• 34:19
  listeners might believe that is the question of is krill fishing
• 34:23
  or any particular activity, is it sustainable?
• 34:26
  Is that a black and white answer?
• 34:27
  Is that an objective fact? No, it's actually a pretty new,
• 34:30
  there's a lot of Gray in the world of sustainability, right.
• 34:34
  And the way that this applies to our system here is that for a
• 34:39
  single stock associated measure of sustainability where the only
• 34:45
  metric that matters if you're just considering one the the
• 34:47
  stock itself, the exploited stock, the question of is the
• 34:52
  fishery sustainable? Is, is the fishery harvesting?
• 34:55
  And it's just true of any fishery, not just the Phil
• 34:57
  fishery. Is the fishery harvesting the
• 35:01
  biomass so fish or krill in this case to the point where it would
• 35:04
  negatively affect the krill population moving forward.
• 35:09
  And the answer is no. We have not seen any evidence to
• 35:12
  suggest that the level of krill fishing that is happening is
• 35:16
  actually going to drive the krill population, for example,
• 35:19
  toward extinction. However, there's a different
• 35:22
  definition of a sustainability, what we think of as ecosystem
• 35:25
  level sustainability, right? Where you actually have to take
• 35:28
  into account the biological and ecological relationships of how
• 35:34
  important the krill are to all the predators and the ecosystem
• 35:38
  that, that make this place very, very special.
• 35:40
  And that's where I think the fact that this, the, the way
• 35:44
  this fishery operates, which is to say incredibly intensely at
• 35:48
  very specific locations, which also happened to be wildlife
• 35:51
  hotspots as Lucia mentioned. And you start to think about
• 35:55
  sustainability from an ecosystem level lens.
• 35:58
  That's where perhaps this system and this fishery is not very
• 36:02
  sustainable or that's what we're trying to sort of nail down
• 36:05
  nuance on, use data, use evidence to sort of ask the
• 36:09
  question or, or in the hypothesis of whether or not
• 36:12
  this fishery is sustainable at an ecosystem level.
• 36:15
  Because while it's true that the catch limit is 1% of the total
• 36:22
  krill biomass in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean,
• 36:25
  that's an area that's about the size of of Europe.
• 36:28
  However, imagine now all krill fishing just happens in Paris,
• 36:33
  in London. But the denominator that you use
• 36:36
  to say, oh, it's only 1% is the entire population of Europe.
• 36:41
  Would that be the appropriate way to say that 1% of of the
• 36:45
  krill here are being being, are being taken every year?
• 36:49
  I think it's very misleading, even though if you say it in in
• 36:53
  and you explain the logic behind it, it might be factually true,
• 36:56
  but at ecologically relevant scales.
• 36:59
  So that is to say the scales that are relevant for Penguins
• 37:02
  as they're raising checks, the scale that is relevant for
• 37:04
  whales as they're putting on layers of blubber that will
• 37:08
  sustain them through the next year.
• 37:10
  If the fishery is taking the most important 1% in the most
• 37:14
  important places, then I think the question of ecosystem
• 37:17
  sustainability of this fishery is very much into question.
• 37:21
  In addition to that, we've seen the deterioration of
• 37:24
  conservation measures that try to spread out the catch or try
• 37:28
  to essentially allow the system to either recover or remain
• 37:32
  resilient in the face of climate change and other pressures.
• 37:36
  And the way that the fishery is operating is might exacerbate
• 37:40
  these climate driven changes or other issues in the ecosystem.
• 37:44
  So we think that this is the area of sustainability of the
• 37:48
  the broad question that you ask is this fishery sustainable and
• 37:52
  a single stock way if you just fully put the blinders on and
• 37:55
  just consider the krill population, Yes.
• 37:57
  And that's what the fishery, you know that's what the fishery
• 37:59
  touts. But if you're interested in
• 38:02
  sustaining well populations in sustaining a Penguin populations
• 38:06
  in a robust Antarctic ecosystem, then I think that is that is,
• 38:11
  you know, more of a question of whether or not the system is
• 38:13
  sustainable, particularly as we've seen the deterioration of
• 38:18
  any sort of measures to make a krill fishing more sustainable.
• 38:22
  Those things are just not being able to pass right now in in
• 38:26
  Antarctic governance. And there's there's various
• 38:28
  political reasons for that which you know, we can get into if you
• 38:30
  want. But the point is, is that, yeah,
• 38:33
  I, I think it's functionally more than 1% because in the
• 38:37
  regions of interest, the denominator is not 62 million
• 38:41
  tons of krill. It's something far, far lower.
• 38:43
  And we can all fish now or these these companies and countries
• 38:46
  can all fish in just one specific area.
• 38:48
  And that's more or less what they do.
• 38:50
  They fish in a couple areas in the Antarctic Peninsula and in
• 38:53
  the South Orkney Islands, where we are now.
• 38:54
  And that's the only place where they fish a little bit in South
• 38:57
  Georgia in the middle of winter. But generally speaking, all the
• 38:59
  krill fishing happens here. So I think we need to think
• 39:02
  carefully about what that means when the fishery says they take
• 39:05
  1% and even if they do just take 1%, what if it's the most
• 39:09
  valuable 1% to the ecosystem, The impact is probably more than
• 39:14
  1%. And that's what we need to think
• 39:16
  about carefully. And that's why recently, as of a
• 39:19
  couple days ago, other Ng OS, other organizations have
• 39:22
  actually objected to the recertification of the krill
• 39:26
  fishery by MSC. And those are, you know,
• 39:29
  organizations that have a lot of name cachet and a lot of
• 39:32
  respect, the Antarctic Southern Ocean Coalition and to the
• 39:35
  world, WWF, the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
• 39:37
  So, yeah, I think this is an issue that now because of folks
• 39:41
  like Lucia and the Sea Shepherd team really sort of bringing
• 39:44
  this issue to light is now allowing the world to to ask the
• 39:48
  question that you asked, Mark, which is to say, is this
• 39:51
  sustainable? Is this the type of Southern
• 39:53
  Ocean and Antarctica that we want?
• 39:55
  Maybe not, and maybe and at the very least we should have an
• 39:58
  informed conversation about it. So that's why I'm really
• 40:00
  grateful for the Sea Shepherd folks to let us collect this
• 40:04
  information so we can answer your question more objectively
• 40:07
  in the coming months and years. Yeah, we've run a campaign on it
• 40:10
  at, we plan it as well. And we've facilitated 1600
• 40:14
  people sending emails of objections to the MSC saying
• 40:19
  they don't believe that this this should be recertified as
• 40:22
  sustainable. Interestingly, the main company
• 40:25
  that takes the krill, which is called Acre QQ Real, Acre
• 40:29
  Biomarine and Acre Grill, they seem to renamed and split up and
• 40:32
  things. But basically it's these
• 40:34
  Norwegian companies which make a big show of being sustainable
• 40:38
  and their CEO will bang on for hours about how sustainable they
• 40:41
  are. But the reality is that the
• 40:43
  impacts that which you've seen absolutely a first hand are
• 40:46
  potentially quite profound on these recovering ecosystems.
• 40:50
  And I think it's something that people really care about.
• 40:52
  And I wouldn't normally do this on the show, but I would say to
• 40:55
  people, there are ways in which you can actually help by not
• 40:58
  buying krill products. You can not buy Amiga 3 health
• 41:01
  supplements, which are krill derived as algal alternatives
• 41:05
  out there on the market, which are price capacity and easy,
• 41:08
  easy to obtain from everywhere. And several retailers are now
• 41:11
  around the world beginning to get krill products off their
• 41:13
  shelves. It also gets into pet food,
• 41:14
  which is some way that people may also be able to track it and
• 41:17
  into farm salmon. So there's feed that goes into
• 41:22
  salmon, of course, to help raise them.
• 41:24
  And so you may be recycling cruel into into farm salmon if
• 41:28
  you're eating that. And I looked into this a bit and
• 41:30
  the fish farming industry has its own sustainability
• 41:34
  certification by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.
• 41:37
  And if you look at the ASC, it says, well, the MSC blue tick is
• 41:40
  all that matters in terms of where the actual wild fish comes
• 41:43
  from, that we're feeding into the farm fish.
• 41:44
  So the MSC thing is, is really critical.
• 41:47
  And Ted, maybe you can talk to us a bit more about this as
• 41:51
  well. Tell us like, I think people do
• 41:54
  care a lot about the Antarctic. Most of us haven't been there.
• 41:57
  We've seen it on the Attenborough film, which also
• 41:58
  had some incredible footage of the.
• 42:00
  Yeah, right here, right here. Wow, Wow.
• 42:03
  Yeah. And there was, there were scenes
• 42:05
  of these, of these trawlers going right through pods of thin
• 42:08
  whales. I think they probably were.
• 42:10
  Tell us a bit more about why, why we might care about this.
• 42:13
  And it's not just whales. There's there's all of these
• 42:17
  other different species as well. There's a special thing going on
• 42:20
  here right now. I mean, to me, honestly, the
• 42:22
  rewilding, the recovery of this population is one of the most
• 42:27
  beautiful bits of rewilding of our planet, right?
• 42:30
  We, you know, most environmental news tends to be bad news,
• 42:34
  unfortunately. But in this case, and it's a
• 42:37
  treat for me as a whale biologist to study species where
• 42:41
  the future in many ways has is looking quite a bit brighter
• 42:46
  than than last century, Right. It's sort of a very basic
• 42:49
  conservation lesson. If you want something to thrive,
• 42:52
  stop killing it. Right.
• 42:55
  Start there. Which is which is what we did 50
• 42:57
  years ago as we stopped industrial whaling.
• 43:00
  Yeah. Yes, you say there is some
• 43:02
  whaling now, but it's, it's, it's tiny by comparison,
• 43:07
  absolutely tiny. And yet now these whales are
• 43:10
  recovering into different oceans than the ones they were haunted
• 43:14
  out of. So to me, I did my PhD and
• 43:19
  focused on humpback whales in the North Pacific and, and the
• 43:22
  surprising discovery, the main impact of of the work was
• 43:27
  uncovering the fact that during the largest marine heat wave
• 43:32
  ever documented, this was 2014 to 2016.
• 43:36
  We ended up calling it the BLOB. It was broadly referred to
• 43:39
  across fishing and sort of all folks concerned with the
• 43:43
  Northeast Pacific. About 1/3 of Hawaii's humpback
• 43:47
  whales actually died, we think primarily of starvation because
• 43:52
  their food was just not available.
• 43:54
  It was also deeper and more dispersed, right.
• 43:56
  So these animals, they, in the right conditions thrive.
• 44:02
  But so there's this resiliency, right, which is what we saw
• 44:05
  after the whaling ended. But there's also a sensitivity
• 44:09
  to an environment that can support them.
• 44:12
  And So what is going on here is climate change, right?
• 44:16
  We're not individually empowered to really affect that, right?
• 44:21
  We need our governments to take lead on that or broadly the
• 44:27
  people to demand that our governments do so.
• 44:29
  But here we're adding on this krill fishery that is, I mean,
• 44:35
  so, so I've worked a lot on the Antarctic Peninsula and I've
• 44:38
  seen the rare case where krill fishing vessels are coming into
• 44:42
  the peninsula and being seen by tourists and it creates A furor.
• 44:47
  I mean, it's, there's a sense of the, the, the sacredness of
• 44:51
  Antarctica. And I think it's a fantastic
• 44:54
  thing. It's a bit like, it's a bit like
• 44:56
  turning and saying, saying, oh gosh, we need some marble.
• 44:58
  Let's go mine the floor of the Sistine Chapel.
• 45:01
  If a krill fishing vessel is there in the beautiful Antarctic
• 45:05
  Peninsula, scenic and all this, to me, a whale here in the South
• 45:10
  Orkney Islands is just as valuable, just as meaningful,
• 45:13
  just as worthy. And yet it's a very out of
• 45:17
  sight, out of mind thing. So our work is in no small way,
• 45:21
  you know, aimed. I mean, there's an objectivity
• 45:23
  to our science. We want to just understand the
• 45:26
  mechanics of the place. But there is also an activism
• 45:29
  side of it, which is we want to put this place on the map and we
• 45:33
  want the world to recognize that this is in our opinion at least,
• 45:37
  and and we believe the numbers will support it.
• 45:39
  What we've seen in the 1st about, you know, a little more
• 45:42
  than a third of our time here, this is arguably the place with
• 45:49
  the highest density of great whales of anywhere on the
• 45:52
  planet. And so we need to recognize the
• 45:55
  the this sort of critical, important habitat, you know,
• 45:59
  this is a crown jewel in the world of recovering oceans.
• 46:03
  And so when we see a krill vessel taking, or rather a fleet
• 46:08
  of krill vessels taking more food out of this ocean, then all
• 46:13
  the whales here combined could possibly eat.
• 46:17
  And those krill fishing vessels aren't, you know, giving back as
• 46:19
  it were. I mean, that's a sort of a soft
• 46:21
  and squishy concept, right? But but these whales literally
• 46:25
  every, you know, let's talk about whale poop, right?
• 46:27
  You saw it the other day. Yes, we did.
• 46:29
  We're zodiacking out. We're in our little boat working
• 46:32
  to get little DNA samples and we passed by this big orange patch
• 46:36
  in the in the ocean. And that is literally
• 46:38
  fertilizer. This whole what, what what Matt
• 46:41
  was talking about of, of, of the krill paradox.
• 46:45
  You know, remarkably, when the whales went away, the action of
• 46:49
  the whales eating the krill, pooping out the remains,
• 46:54
  fertilizing the ocean, feeding the phytoplankton that feed the
• 46:58
  krill. It's, you know, it's easy to
• 47:00
  think about it. Oh, the whales were gone.
• 47:02
  The krill predators were gone. So then suddenly all the krill
• 47:05
  must have expanded and exploded, right?
• 47:08
  Much as if the wolves are gone, they'll be a lot more deer or
• 47:11
  elk or something right to put. But this is think of a different
• 47:15
  analogy. Let's say you took out the
• 47:17
  farmers. 10 years later, you go back and you do you expect those
• 47:21
  fields to be growing as much crops without farmers there?
• 47:26
  Not so much, right? No, the whales aren't
• 47:29
  consciously and actively farming these oceans, but their presence
• 47:34
  in this ecosystem literally does that.
• 47:36
  Where when they were away, when they when they were removed, the
• 47:41
  mechanism by which the krills food, the phytoplankton was
• 47:45
  delivered nutrients, a big piece of that was suddenly gone.
• 47:49
  And so krill populations declined.
• 47:51
  So the whales coming back feeds also the Penguins, it feeds also
• 47:56
  the seals. And you know, honestly very well
• 47:59
  managed, managed in a precautionary way.
• 48:02
  Like, for example, we believe that a buffer around the South
• 48:05
  Orkney Islands, as South Georgia has done, South Georgia has put
• 48:09
  a no take zone where in the summer and year round there's a
• 48:13
  buffer such that no krill can be taken near shore to the islands
• 48:17
  in the area that we believe is most important for the marine
• 48:22
  life. That would be a really good idea
• 48:25
  here. And that's something that the
• 48:26
  world could do honestly quite quickly if we could, you know,
• 48:30
  figure out how to how to govern in this space.
• 48:32
  Yeah. And in fact, that's what's
• 48:34
  proposed by ASOC and also by Argentina and Chile, I think in
• 48:39
  in the in this CAMLA body, the Commission for the Conservation
• 48:43
  of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which actually
• 48:45
  governs the fisheries. There is this proposal for a
• 48:48
  marine protected area in the area called Domain One, which I
• 48:52
  think is where you're more or less currently in.
• 48:54
  Right. Yes.
• 48:54
  So that it's not as if there are no ideas out there for how to
• 48:59
  protect the ecosystem a bit more directly.
• 49:01
  And it doesn't necessarily mean shutting the entire krill
• 49:04
  fishery down. There's a lot more that needs to
• 49:05
  be done. Right.
• 49:06
  Yeah. No, absolutely.
• 49:07
  And I, I mean, I think I, I personally might, I mean, do I
• 49:11
  think we should be fishing in the Antarctic?
• 49:12
  My personal opinion is no. However, I do think there is a
• 49:16
  way that, you know, we can have our krill and eat it too or
• 49:20
  whatever, whatever the correct analogy is here.
• 49:22
  And that's just really careful cautionary management of the
• 49:25
  fishery. And some aspects of the fishery
• 49:28
  seem open to that. Perhaps not every nation, every
• 49:30
  vessel, but a lot of the krill fishing companies realize that
• 49:34
  their whole brand is how is that the the krill they have is
• 49:37
  sustainable and it's pure and it's, you know, clean all this
• 49:41
  stuff, all these sort of buzzwords associated with with
• 49:44
  responsible behavior of this very fragile ecosystem.
• 49:48
  And yet what we're seeing might not align with that.
• 49:51
  And I think as a result, they're probably getting nervous at the
• 49:54
  sense that, you know, we're, we're, you know, showing and,
• 49:57
  and, and we'll see if it's demonstrating based on the data,
• 50:00
  but showing and perhaps demonstrating how, you know, the
• 50:04
  way they extract the krill in this ecosystem is perhaps not
• 50:07
  as, as sustainable and perhaps could be done in better ways.
• 50:11
  And I think what Ted mentioned is an is an obvious sort of
• 50:13
  compromise, which is to say we've identified the South
• 50:17
  Orkney Islands and you know, within let's say 50 kilometers,
• 50:21
  30 kilometers of the shores of these islands as incredibly
• 50:25
  productive zones. We are currently, you know, in
• 50:28
  the midst of the science collecting the data to see if it
• 50:31
  supports something like a no take zone around the South
• 50:35
  Orkneys, just like there is a no take zone around South Georgia.
• 50:39
  And and if it does, then I think that's an easy compromise that I
• 50:43
  hope the fishery would be would be open to, right.
• 50:45
  Because, you know, I feel like, you know, I don't know if I'd
• 50:48
  ever be a vocal supporter of the fishery, but, you know, I don't
• 50:52
  necessarily from my personal position need to denigrate it
• 50:55
  either. If they're responsible actors,
• 50:57
  then there might be a way that, you know, we can all coexist,
• 51:00
  even if it's not specifically something that I think we should
• 51:03
  be doing. But there are definitely ways to
• 51:04
  do this better. And I think that is really what
• 51:07
  the objection of a sock WWF and and we plan it and others are
• 51:11
  opposed to is not necessarily the fishery as a whole, but
• 51:15
  rather the way the fishery is acting and just receiving, you
• 51:19
  know, a blue check mark from MSC when it's just like, well, wait
• 51:22
  a minute, you know, what exactly are are we basing this on?
• 51:26
  And is this actually the Southern Ocean of the Antarctica
• 51:29
  that we want? And it's kind of fun also to to
• 51:31
  be working with folks on all sides of the spectrum.
• 51:33
  Like I'm not opposed to and in fact, I would welcome
• 51:36
  collaboration with the fishery to think about solutions and
• 51:40
  compromises. But then also to be here on a
• 51:42
  Sea Shepherd boat where there are clear directive is, you
• 51:45
  know, no fishing in the Antarctic whatsoever.
• 51:47
  And I mean, you know, that's I think a very strong position and
• 51:50
  one that one that I think would be hard to object to.
• 51:53
  But I'm I'm a little bit more in the middle on that personally.
• 51:56
  But I'm just willing to see what the data suggests of how we can
• 51:58
  best conserve this place and the human activity that may or may
• 52:02
  not occur here. But it's been really fun to sort
• 52:05
  of see these different dimensions of, you know,
• 52:07
  governance and policy and science and activism kind of all
• 52:11
  coming to together because it's an issue, because it's a place
• 52:14
  that we all really passionately care about, Antarctica and, you
• 52:19
  know, a place that that we're set to lose if we don't, if we
• 52:21
  don't treat it with the respect that it deserves.
• 52:24
  Yeah, well, the krill fishing company, Acre Curiel, you know,
• 52:28
  the Norwegian trawling firm, which takes 2/3 of the entire
• 52:33
  catch claims to support the the marine protected area in their
• 52:38
  communications. But behind the scenes, the
• 52:41
  Norwegian government in, in the, in, in Kamla and this
• 52:44
  conservation body which regulates the whole thing, we're
• 52:47
  we're apparently asking for a doubling of the krill take.
• 52:51
  So there's a lot of strange machinations going on behind
• 52:54
  closed doors. But Lucia, maybe if we can pass
• 52:57
  on to you, tell us about the specifics of the, the science
• 53:01
  that you're carrying out on on the boat there.
• 53:03
  Because I know I was talking to Matt earlier a few days ago and
• 53:07
  he he was telling me that most of the research that has gone on
• 53:09
  in the past simply due to funding constraints has gone on
• 53:12
  on krill fishing vessels. So here you are as an NGO, which
• 53:16
  is, which has a conservation mandate.
• 53:17
  And so presumably you can focus very specifically on on the
• 53:20
  science that you want to do. So tell us what that looks like
• 53:23
  on a, you know, day-to-day basis.
• 53:25
  Yeah, sure, this math might be better to answer, but I can
• 53:29
  start and then math can pick up. So yeah, as you are saying, the
• 53:33
  best thing we can offer is that independency from great fishing
• 53:37
  vessels, not only in dependency as in we have our ideas and we
• 53:42
  can carry them without really being pressured or living in the
• 53:46
  same space as the fishing vessel, which always makes
• 53:49
  research a bit trickier. But we what we can have is this
• 53:53
  spatial independence so we can observe and study the whales not
• 53:59
  only next to fishing vessels but also in other areas.
• 54:03
  Something that we have been saying since the first year we
• 54:06
  came that last year we really pushed for it and this year we
• 54:09
  have these guys to try to scientifically show it is how
• 54:14
  overlapped the whales and the cruel fishing fleet are for us.
• 54:18
  It's something that we have seen every time.
• 54:20
  Once we go next to the cruel fishing fleet, there's going to
• 54:22
  be blows everywhere, whales everywhere and then there's
• 54:26
  going to be a line. It was a cruel fishing vessels
• 54:28
  turn. So they do this pattern like
• 54:30
  back and forth to fish. Once we reach the line in which
• 54:33
  they're going to turn around, if we keep going in that direction,
• 54:37
  there is no ways to be seen. There is no wildlife to be seen.
• 54:41
  So we keep trying to prove this point of when we talk about this
• 54:46
  1%, when we talk about the quotas, it doesn't work because
• 54:50
  they live exactly in really, really concentrated places.
• 54:54
  So what we try to do this year is since we have the time, the
• 54:58
  space and the science to study the areas in which the cruel
• 55:01
  fishing fleet are not spending their time.
• 55:04
  Do we see the same amount of whales to the whales behaving
• 55:07
  the same way or is just cruel? Fishing fleet happens in exactly
• 55:12
  the same point where whales feet and whales hang out.
• 55:16
  So this is what we're trying to do.
• 55:17
  Just to add on to a little bit too, Lucy is awesome answer
• 55:20
  there is at this is all you should say.
• 55:23
  All the stuff is preliminary and anecdotal because we're still
• 55:26
  underway and you know be fun to come back in a couple months and
• 55:29
  talk in a more finalized way about what we've found.
• 55:32
  But I think one of the things that's been pretty inspiring to
• 55:35
  me, and I mean, Ted might want to chime in here as well, is
• 55:39
  that we are seeing a lot of whale activity and wildlife
• 55:42
  activity of all sorts as we come upon the krill fishery.
• 55:45
  But also we've seen large groups of whales far from the krill
• 55:49
  fishery as well. So that gives us hope for the
• 55:52
  resilience and the integrity of this ecosystem even in the face
• 55:56
  of increasing krill fishing pressure.
• 55:58
  Now, I could see, for example, an industry representative
• 56:02
  saying, well, you know, if there's whales all over,
• 56:05
  including not just by the fishery but also in other
• 56:07
  places, then there's probably enough krill for all, right.
• 56:11
  And I think what I would say to that is, and I've heard, I've
• 56:14
  read this, This is why I could conceive of this being a point
• 56:18
  that would try to be made. But I go back to the bigger
• 56:21
  reason why we're here, which is to say that if we are in perhaps
• 56:25
  the most important whale feeding ground on Earth, shouldn't it be
• 56:29
  protected? Shouldn't we not have industrial
• 56:32
  extraction of of whale food and Penguin food in that area?
• 56:36
  Imagine running an AG combine through the Serengeti during the
• 56:40
  wildebeest migration, right? I mean, imagine clear cutting
• 56:44
  the Amazon rainforest, which we are doing and people are upset
• 56:47
  about, rightfully so. But here something maybe not on
• 56:51
  the same scale or in a different way, but that type of behavior
• 56:54
  is happening here. And just because we see whales
• 56:58
  in other locations in this amazing region, not not solely
• 57:02
  by the fishery, to me says, OK, this area is even of greater
• 57:07
  conservation importance than even I recognized.
• 57:10
  It's not just that we have whales and the fishery on top of
• 57:13
  each other, which we do have that, but we also have much
• 57:16
  bigger populations of whales and Penguins and so on then we might
• 57:20
  have otherwise understood, which to me suggests that this area is
• 57:24
  in dire need of real conservation like an
• 57:26
  international marine MPA. And like you said, I think, you
• 57:30
  know, Norway and other folks have pushed for that, for this
• 57:33
  MPA to pass. But I think it's important,
• 57:35
  Mark, to mention to your listeners that, and just because
• 57:39
  something is called a marine protected area, it depends on
• 57:42
  what the specifics of that protection are.
• 57:44
  There are a lot of marine protected areas both in
• 57:47
  Antarctica and around the world that allow fishing and allow
• 57:51
  industrial extraction. So just because something is
• 57:53
  labeled as an MPA, the devil is in the details.
• 57:57
  And we need to be really careful about when and how and where
• 58:00
  we're doing extraction in the oceans, regardless of what label
• 58:04
  we put on this ecosystem. But, you know, it's a very, very
• 58:07
  special place and, and one that we want to see and the one that
• 58:10
  we want to have on our planet for, for decades and centuries
• 58:13
  to come so that we can continue to know that this place exists
• 58:17
  on our planet. It's really, it's really an
• 58:18
  amazing space. So I don't know if that answered
• 58:21
  your, your questions, but we're really passionate about this
• 58:23
  project. Obviously, you know, and and
• 58:26
  it's just been exceptional to be here with Sea Shepherd because
• 58:30
  we are the only group that is able to do a fisheries
• 58:33
  independent survey. What that means is the fishing
• 58:37
  boats and they have scientists that would that you know, Ted
• 58:40
  and I know and we enjoy working with, I enjoy the science that
• 58:43
  they put out. But the thing that they can't do
• 58:46
  is tell us what's happening in the ecosystem, not around the
• 58:50
  fishery. They can't do a fisheries
• 58:52
  independent survey of the region, which is exactly what
• 58:55
  we're doing here. We're trying to understand at a
• 58:58
  landscape scale, at a big scale, what's happening in different
• 59:01
  portions of this ecosystem. And yes, some of those portions
• 59:05
  there is intense krill fishing, but many there aren't.
• 59:07
  And we want to have a bigger, more holistic picture to sort of
• 59:10
  promote this place on the global stage.
• 59:13
  To think of it in the same way we think of the Amazon
• 59:15
  rainforest, in the the same way we think of the Serengeti.
• 59:18
  You could never do something like this in the Serengeti
• 59:21
  because it's the Serengeti. And this place, we think should
• 59:24
  be on par with those locations as well.
• 59:26
  So I don't know whether, Ted, this is for you, but what are
• 59:28
  you actually measuring and how are you going about it?
• 59:31
  Yeah. This is so I'm just the kid in
• 59:34
  the candy shop here, right? And, and, and from a scientist
• 59:39
  point of view, it's been a really special expedition.
• 59:41
  I didn't honestly, when Suvoka first brought this up, I thought
• 59:45
  that'd be nice, you know, honestly didn't believe it would
• 59:48
  happen because typically a voyage like this with a
• 59:50
  dedicated vessel, it'd be years of planning, fundraising, grant
• 59:54
  writing, so on and so forth. And this all really unfolded in
• 59:57
  the last few months, which led to a scramble and, and I'm very
• 1:00:01
  excited and happy 1 And I think it's, it's, we're just delighted
• 1:00:04
  that things have come together. So what are we measuring?
• 1:00:06
  We're trying honestly to measure kind of doing the everything we
• 1:00:10
  can, but particularly focused on a structured survey to be able
• 1:00:16
  to come away with a estimate. Of whale numbers, species and
• 1:00:22
  where. And one of the most striking
• 1:00:25
  things that we got here and I'd, I'd heard this time and again,
• 1:00:28
  especially from the captains of the last years of the Sea
• 1:00:32
  Shepherd campaign, when we approach the krill fishers, then
• 1:00:35
  we will see whales and OK, you know, that's interesting.
• 1:00:39
  But then to see it in person was was, you know, caused us to
• 1:00:43
  start to shift our methodology a bit to, you know, to be able to
• 1:00:48
  document a strong overlap of density between where we see the
• 1:00:53
  crow fishers and where we see the whales.
• 1:00:55
  Now, just as Matt mentioned, right, we've also had some big
• 1:00:59
  patches of whales away. So what we're trying to do is in
• 1:01:02
  space and time, understand where the whales are and to as best as
• 1:01:08
  we can what they're doing. And that what they're doing is
• 1:01:11
  kind of a big open piece that we're inserting a few different
• 1:01:16
  techniques. So the big, the big effort is
• 1:01:19
  surveying where we're driving the ship in a planned route
• 1:01:23
  that's independent of either where we expect to see the
• 1:01:27
  whales or where we expect to see the crow fishers.
• 1:01:30
  Well, covering the broad area, right.
• 1:01:32
  And so we're on the bridge counting in a very specific way
• 1:01:36
  how far away using special binoculars that measure the the
• 1:01:40
  basically drop from the bridge. So, and then the angle from the
• 1:01:43
  ship so that we can place each whale on a map and each whale
• 1:01:47
  siding gets pretty exciting when we came across roughly 200 fin
• 1:01:52
  whales day before yesterday. The data recorder is you could
• 1:01:56
  see smoke coming off of their fingers and, you know, changing
• 1:02:00
  out folks just because it was actually like, oh, okay, I've
• 1:02:02
  got a whale. I've got three whales here.
• 1:02:04
  I've got 4 whales at, you know, at 30° and so on and so forth.
• 1:02:08
  How many times have you seen that in your 30 year career in
• 1:02:10
  Antarctica? Well now I've seen this twice
• 1:02:14
  and both of them have been on this trip.
• 1:02:16
  It's really, that part is special.
• 1:02:19
  Yeah. Oh, no, it's this is this is
• 1:02:21
  like nothing I've ever seen, really.
• 1:02:23
  Honestly, I've seen three super aggregations of whales defined
• 1:02:26
  it in this case, say defining as 100 whales.
• 1:02:29
  One of them was in Monterey Bay, California, 10 years ago.
• 1:02:32
  And then the other two have been in the last week here.
• 1:02:35
  I'm seeing many, many, many whales.
• 1:02:37
  And there's places on the Antarctic Peninsula where you
• 1:02:39
  can just get dozens and dozens of whales.
• 1:02:41
  But this concentration with this kind of active feeding, like
• 1:02:45
  it's really, it's like honestly, it's, it's like going to that
• 1:02:48
  square in, in, in in Tokyo where with every change of the lights,
• 1:02:53
  just there's a flood of people charging through.
• 1:02:56
  That's a bit how it feels among these whales with so to measure
• 1:03:01
  that we're also flying drones over the animals to be able to
• 1:03:05
  assess their body condition. We can actually measure their
• 1:03:08
  length and width, also observe behavior that way.
• 1:03:11
  We've seen some incredible what we call echelon feeding where
• 1:03:14
  multiple thin whales are gulping water at the same time or in
• 1:03:19
  immediate succession. In order to kind of coordinate
• 1:03:23
  to get the best possible and most successful feeding.
• 1:03:27
  We are going out by small boat to take little genetic samples
• 1:03:30
  from whales where we can. And so with that we can
• 1:03:35
  determine the sex of the individual, if female, we can
• 1:03:38
  determine if pregnant. This is working with a with a a
• 1:03:42
  colleague at UC Santa Cruz, University of California, Santa
• 1:03:45
  Cruz, who who in his PhD were Logan Palin.
• 1:03:48
  He was able to link that pregnancy rates vary
• 1:03:53
  dramatically with humpback whales from as low as like 25%
• 1:03:57
  to as high as 80% depending on ice conditions.
• 1:04:02
  So. How'd you get a genetic sample
• 1:04:04
  from a whale? Isn't that fantastic?
• 1:04:06
  Yeah. So what we do is we actually
• 1:04:07
  bounce a little dart off of the back of the whale.
• 1:04:10
  It's a bit. Well, it's a biopsy sample.
• 1:04:12
  So, right, you saw, you know, your doctor says to you, oh, we
• 1:04:14
  have concerns. We need to, you know, biopsy
• 1:04:17
  your liver. Kind of the same thing, except
• 1:04:20
  for we actually use a dart thrown by a crossbow.
• 1:04:23
  It bounces off the whale. It's probably a bit like a a
• 1:04:26
  mosquito bite or I think that the whales react sometimes, not
• 1:04:31
  always. The reaction reaction is what
• 1:04:34
  seemed to be more by surprise. We actually had a whale 2 two
• 1:04:37
  days ago where I missed the shot.
• 1:04:40
  The dart went over the whale and hit the water behind the whale
• 1:04:43
  and it reacted similarly. The splash and the noise of the
• 1:04:46
  splash was like, you know, kind of similar reaction.
• 1:04:50
  So we're, we're pretty confident it's minimally invasive.
• 1:04:53
  And so when we take this little bit of skin and a little bit of
• 1:04:56
  blubber, I freeze it. And then when we get it home, we
• 1:05:00
  can pull genetics out of the skin, we can pull estrogen
• 1:05:04
  concentration out of the blubber, we can pull various
• 1:05:07
  toxicology and hormones out of the blubber.
• 1:05:10
  Really, really fantastic quantity of information in just
• 1:05:13
  a tiny little package. We are also towing a hydrophone
• 1:05:17
  to listen to not just not just the bailing whales that we're
• 1:05:21
  seeing, right? There's large filter feeding
• 1:05:23
  whales, but also toothed whales like killer whales, sperm
• 1:05:27
  whales, these rare beaked whales that are things you never see
• 1:05:31
  'cause they can spend a couple hours underwater for every 10
• 1:05:34
  minutes on the surface. See what else?
• 1:05:36
  Oh, we have an echo sounder running so that we can map the
• 1:05:39
  prey concentrations right Where there's krill is where we see
• 1:05:44
  the whales. That's just anecdotal.
• 1:05:45
  What? No surprise, right?
• 1:05:47
  You're, you're, you know, if you're hungry, you go to where
• 1:05:50
  the food is, not to open, just empty water.
• 1:05:53
  But you're not, you're not mapping the krill biomass
• 1:05:56
  concentration because I've, I've heard that the data for the
• 1:06:00
  actual abundance of krill and the spatial abundance as well
• 1:06:02
  where the krill actually is and in what quantities is also
• 1:06:06
  somewhat out of date. And that's a concern really with
• 1:06:08
  this sustainability certification.
• 1:06:10
  Matt, I don't know or Lucy whether you're better placed to,
• 1:06:13
  to address this. But do we, what do we know about
• 1:06:16
  how much krill is actually out there?
• 1:06:17
  And therefore we can draw some conclusions about whether a
• 1:06:21
  human fishery could be sustained.
• 1:06:23
  Yeah, I think we probably all have some knowledge and and
• 1:06:26
  opinions on that. But I think what I want to
• 1:06:29
  highlight is the spatial mismatch between the surveys
• 1:06:34
  that have been done and the ecologically relevant scales for
• 1:06:38
  predators. So the, the fishing fleet,
• 1:06:41
  particularly the Norwegians, they, they take, you know, huge
• 1:06:44
  sort of transects. They're running a very fancy
• 1:06:47
  echo Sounders, autonomous, a little boats in front of their
• 1:06:50
  boats called krill mobiles. It's kind of amazing to see an
• 1:06:53
  autonomous sort of like robot boat that can lead their, their
• 1:06:57
  large catcher ships to the areas of highest krill density.
• 1:07:01
  But they publish a lot of that information and, and share it.
• 1:07:04
  And so we get to see sort of where they're finding the most
• 1:07:07
  krill over the years, but they're surveying a vast area,
• 1:07:11
  you know, and, and what we're doing is we're we're serving an
• 1:07:14
  area and much higher resolution at scales that matter to
• 1:07:19
  foraging predators, right? So when you think about these
• 1:07:22
  large numbers that, you know, for example, the fishery uses or
• 1:07:26
  scientists use at really large scales, you know, 10s of
• 1:07:28
  millions of tons, 60 million tons, whatever, that's good to
• 1:07:32
  know. But what's most relevant to the
• 1:07:34
  animals is what is actually on their potential dinner plate for
• 1:07:38
  that night, right? Not all the food in the world,
• 1:07:40
  but rather what could potentially be a meal for them
• 1:07:44
  on that given day. And that's sort of more of the
• 1:07:46
  data that we're interested in thinking about it from the
• 1:07:49
  whales perspective rather than from a human exploitation
• 1:07:52
  perspective. And yeah, I mean, so, so again,
• 1:07:55
  if you're taking these big broad surveys of a huge region, the
• 1:07:58
  region size of continental US or Europe, the data that that the
• 1:08:03
  fishing fleet has has taken and in some cases provided is quite
• 1:08:08
  good. I mean, there's no, there's no
• 1:08:10
  reason why why I have to suspect that it's not being reported
• 1:08:13
  accurately, but it's not really what's most relevant to
• 1:08:16
  wildlife, right? So it depends on sort of what
• 1:08:19
  angle you're approaching this from.
• 1:08:21
  And, and similarly, you know, there is this notion of like,
• 1:08:25
  well, if there's more krill in the ocean and that Broadway, we
• 1:08:28
  can increase catch, right? We, I mean, we can increase
• 1:08:31
  more, we can catch more. But the issue is that we're
• 1:08:33
  going to actually just increase that catch on these specific
• 1:08:36
  places. We're not going to go increase
• 1:08:38
  catch and go elsewhere. We're going to increase catch in
• 1:08:41
  just this area, just the Antarctic Peninsula because
• 1:08:44
  there's more krill all over the Scotia Sea.
• 1:08:47
  Like how does that align? That doesn't really make sense
• 1:08:50
  to me anyway, at least from an ecological perspective.
• 1:08:52
  So yeah, I, I think it's a, you know, an issue that we're here
• 1:08:55
  to kind of shed more light on and, and, and observe in a
• 1:08:58
  higher resolution, one that matters more to the preservation
• 1:09:01
  of the ecosystem. Well, on this podcast, we're
• 1:09:03
  about saving the world from bad ideas.
• 1:09:04
  I think we can probably all have a consensus that krill fishing
• 1:09:08
  in the Antarctica is a bad idea. So we can, I've got that in our,
• 1:09:11
  in our comms for this episode. And I wouldn't, as I say, I
• 1:09:14
  wouldn't normally do this because I'm supposed to
• 1:09:16
  fundraise for We Planet. But I would encourage listeners
• 1:09:19
  and viewers to support C Shepherd because I think you're
• 1:09:22
  doing amazing work down there, both in terms of the
• 1:09:25
  straightforward awareness raising of this and also hosting
• 1:09:29
  an incredible scientific research expedition, which which
• 1:09:33
  Matt and Ted and yourself are currently working on.
• 1:09:36
  So any any final thoughts to leave us with?
• 1:09:39
  Something very cool that we're doing this year, for example, is
• 1:09:42
  that we're sharing not only our results and what we're seeing,
• 1:09:46
  but also live on the ship in a web series.
• 1:09:49
  So your listeners, whoever they want, they can check on YouTube,
• 1:09:52
  C Shepherd. And once a week we have like an
• 1:09:55
  episode of our results, our first encounter with the krill
• 1:09:58
  fishing fleet. We don't have to forget that
• 1:10:01
  Antarctica is really far. So it take us a month to arrive
• 1:10:04
  to Antarctica and a month to go back to New Zealand because it's
• 1:10:07
  where the ship is based for their other campaigns.
• 1:10:11
  For us, what is really cool in Sea Shepherd is that we approach
• 1:10:14
  a lot of different problems with with all the ships that we have
• 1:10:18
  and the crew that we have. So I would recommend everyone to
• 1:10:21
  just check our website, check our Instagram.
• 1:10:24
  We have this beautiful campaign, but we also do a lot of
• 1:10:27
  campaigns against illegal and regulated and unreported fishing
• 1:10:31
  in West Africa, in the Pacific Islands.
• 1:10:34
  So it's really, really interesting everything we can do
• 1:10:37
  when people donate their money, people donate their time and
• 1:10:40
  come and do with us. If anyone is interested, there's
• 1:10:43
  always a position on board. So I would really recommend
• 1:10:47
  everyone to just check what we're doing and I'm sure that
• 1:10:50
  there's going to be something that excites them.
• 1:10:52
  Thanks so much, Matt and Ted. Any final thoughts from you?
• 1:10:55
  Yeah. I mean, I think we just want to,
• 1:10:57
  I mean, I'll, I'll speak in the night.
• 1:10:59
  Ted can speak as well. But I think a lot of our
• 1:11:00
  thoughts will overlap here. I mean, we're humbled by this
• 1:11:03
  experience to be able to have this opportunity and to say that
• 1:11:07
  no other scientists are having this opportunity is not a
• 1:11:10
  hyperbole. I don't think any other
• 1:11:12
  scientists besides those that are aboard crill fishing vessels
• 1:11:15
  are having this opportunity. So this is unique in the, in the
• 1:11:18
  literal sense of the word. And you know, we're all very
• 1:11:21
  passionate about this idea. We're not, I'm not, you know,
• 1:11:24
  getting paid to do this. I'm, there's an incredible in
• 1:11:27
  kind support from Sea Shepherd and from other folks that have
• 1:11:30
  allowed us to be here without going broke.
• 1:11:32
  And that's very much appreciated.
• 1:11:33
  But, you know, I'm here out of a passion project and one that I
• 1:11:37
  think is, you know, if we have these scientific skills and, and
• 1:11:41
  this and this ability to add data and information to, you
• 1:11:44
  know, support conservation, then that's what we're going to do.
• 1:11:48
  And so if you have, you know, readers or not read well,
• 1:11:50
  readers, but also listeners that that think this work is
• 1:11:53
  foundational and important, you know, and want to, you know,
• 1:11:56
  contribute to more scientific expeditions in this region.
• 1:11:59
  I think that would be incredibly welcome because we'd love to
• 1:12:02
  come back and make this, you know, a multi year study where
• 1:12:05
  we can really start to answer questions in how.
• 1:12:07
  Do people do that? How do people find out how to
• 1:12:09
  support you? Great question yeah, I mean, I
• 1:12:12
  they could probably get in touch with me, Matt Savoca or Ted
• 1:12:15
  Cheeseman or Lucia Marillo on the Sea Shepherd.
• 1:12:18
  And if you know, I plea you provide he provide our contact
• 1:12:22
  information with the with the episode.
• 1:12:24
  Yeah, we. Can put it, we'll put it.
• 1:12:25
  That's a good idea. We'll put it in the show notes.
• 1:12:27
  Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah, please do.
• 1:12:29
  Because, yeah, I mean, like this is this is more or less a
• 1:12:31
  crowdfunded organ. Well, Sea Shepherd is a is a
• 1:12:34
  crowdfunding organization operating entirely on donations.
• 1:12:38
  And that, you know, we want to continue to come back here as
• 1:12:41
  long as the, the fishing fleet is here, as long as we feel as
• 1:12:44
  though we don't know enough about this region to fully
• 1:12:48
  protect it, we would like to, to continue this type of work here.
• 1:12:52
  We think it's absolutely imperative for the conservation
• 1:12:54
  of of one of the most special places on our planet.
• 1:12:56
  So, you know, if folks are listening and are interested in
• 1:12:59
  supporting, you know, please do get in touch with one or all
• 1:13:02
  three of us, You know, we'd be very happy to have your support
• 1:13:06
  on vital work like this. So thanks so much, Mark, for
• 1:13:08
  having us US on and giving us this platform to speak about the
• 1:13:10
  work. And yeah, I'll let Ted sign off
• 1:13:12
  now, but really do appreciate this time.
• 1:13:14
  Thanks, Matt. Chairs well thank you Mark it's
• 1:13:16
  a pleasure to chat with you and and and your listeners look from
• 1:13:19
  my point of view, you know the the in the spirit of your
• 1:13:23
  podcast saving the world from bad ideas.
• 1:13:26
  These are not simple things because they're far away.
• 1:13:28
  It's not just, oh, don't buy this, it's it's what really
• 1:13:32
  needs to happen here is coordinated public will to save
• 1:13:39
  these great places, right? And that's, that's many things.
• 1:13:44
  That's insisting that our governments work together and
• 1:13:48
  that there's global collaboration and coordination.
• 1:13:51
  There's also many things like the downstream impacts of this.
• 1:13:54
  You mentioned salmon farming. That is where the majority of
• 1:13:58
  this krill goes is into farming Atlantic salmon, which also has
• 1:14:03
  its own downstream impact, impacts of coastal marine
• 1:14:06
  pollution. And to think about do we want to
• 1:14:09
  take nutrients out of the Antarctic, put it into coastal
• 1:14:14
  waterways to feed in, you know, invasive non-native fish?
• 1:14:19
  We've we've created quite a system to do that.
• 1:14:22
  And I think there's a lot more healthy food systems, quite
• 1:14:25
  frankly, just strictly for health, not even out of ecology,
• 1:14:29
  but it's a for health. So yeah, thank you.
• 1:14:31
  It's a real treat to to to be here and to to talk with you and
• 1:14:35
  all. Well, thanks, Ted, and thanks
• 1:14:37
  Matt and Lucia as well. It's really kind of you to spare
• 1:14:39
  spare time. I hope the storm abates soon.
• 1:14:42
  Good to get all three of you shot there in front of your
• 1:14:45
  porthole. And, well, I, I, yeah, as I say
• 1:14:49
  to the storm of Bates, you can get on, get on with your
• 1:14:51
  science, I think. But for now, it's just, I'm glad
• 1:14:54
  it's been stormy because you've been up to spare more than an
• 1:14:56
  hour for me. So I think all, all of us have
• 1:14:59
  really benefited from from hearing about what you're doing
• 1:15:01
  and just hearing the passion with which you're doing it.
• 1:15:04
  So thanks again for joining us and for helping to save the
• 1:15:07
  world from bad ideas. Thank you.
• 1:15:10
  So much cheers. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:15:15
  Saving the World from Bad Ideas, a Weplanet podcast.
• 1:15:19
  Weplanet's a movement of citizens and scientists
• 1:15:21
  dedicated to defending the science and solutions we need to
• 1:15:24
  save the world. Please do subscribe and share a
• 1:15:26
  nice review. It helps us spread the message.
• 1:15:28
  We'd also love to hear your feedback and suggestions at our
• 1:15:30
  e-mail podcast at weplanet.org. Please also join our podcast
• 1:15:35
  mailing list and we'll let you know when a new episode drops.
• 1:15:37
  Just go to Saving the World from badideas.org or
• 1:15:40
  weplanet.org/podcast right now. See you next time.