The older, sicker patients who visit the naturopath whose office I manage often bring questions about the latest treatment options from the Internet, and one recent favorite is krill. Krill oil for humans is already widely available. As a docent whose tour includes a blue whale presentation, I wonder whether krill can be harvested for humans without impinging on the animal supply.

Last year for a short time the trendy treatment was colostrum. A precursor to breast milk produced by all lactating female mammals for a short time after giving birth, colostrum is indeed a superfood. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that there is no cruelty-free way to procure this substance in any meaningful amounts, despite the army of people with various states of liver, kidney, heart, and lung ailments who are desperate to limp, crawl, cough, ache, medicate, supplement, bypass, and -ectomy their way to a few more weeks or months of health-free lifespan.

Not to mention their similarly-afflicted and -treated pets.

Today I am not only thinking about krill, I am seeking a Kindle book to download for travel reading, and I lit upon The Curious Life of Krill. Based on the sample I read, the scientist-author is an upbeat fellow, and feels that there are so many krill that even humans won’t be able to overfish them, though he does allow that we might disturb certain populations, and in turn the local food chains that rely on those populations.

Of course we will!

The good news here is that we have already put many restrictions on krill fishing in the Southern Ocean, well before any collapse, though not before evidence of strain and measurably reduced populations. But while people, especially people who might die some day, want krill and can pay for it, I think Capitalism, that boon to all, will find a way to circumvent restrictions, especially in an international treaty area.

Maybe Nature will rise up. Sadly, I don’t think an Avatar-level natural revolt is possible, but some response is not unheard of. For instance, since poachers take large-tusk animals preferentially, the gene pool for large tusks has been drastically cut, and many fewer African elephants are developing tusks, while those that do, develop smaller ones. If the poachers, who are definitely going for the smaller tusks now, manage to eliminate tusks from the gene pool, the tuskless elephant may actually survive.

Unnatural selection.

Of course, we can’t always eliminate the desired goody. Sharks, for example, can’t really exist without fins, and over 200,000 sharks are killed each day for shark fin soup alone. I know a little about sharks, from that same docent gig, and they play a huge role in ocean ecosystems. So please don’t eat shark fin soup! Better yet, convince your Chinese friend not to serve it at the wedding.

You can probably also find organizations helping elephants, sharks, pangolins, and other creatures we are targeting for extinction. Yes, targeting. Perhaps inadvertently, but no less inexorably.

Back to blue whales: We already reduced their populations by 90% in the twentieth century, and while they aren’t reducing any more, they aren’t recovering  since the moratorium on blue whale hunting imposed in 1967. That’s fifty years, and we don’t know what the issue is. Are there just too few for them to find each other? Are they too discouraged by the genocide to mate? Is the depleted gene pool insufficiently robust? Are they facing other stressors, possibly ocean noise, too many tankers, climate change? Huge animals who roam globally, have no set migration patterns, and communicate across hundreds of miles are hard to study.

Speaking of climate change, whales in general not only sequester huge amounts of carbon due to their size, they positively impact atmospheric carbon because they have behaviors that product both more phytoplankton and more marine plants. Killing over 300,000 blue whales in about eighty years was not a very smart move.

I vote we use the Precautionary Principle in the case of krill.