I read an editorial in Science this morning about Antarctic krill that inspires me to blog instead of whatever I would normally do right now. This is my second alert on krill in as many days; I saw (powdered) krill in CVS yesterday, which made me sad.

You know krill, right? These tiny crustaceans are the primary food source for blue whales, as well as occasional food for other baleen whales and many other types of marine life. At the Seymour Center, docents have always discussed krill at our blue whale stop, but since it re-opened, we’ve re-focused the presentation on the krill crisis. What happens to krill, we ask visitors, when the population of the primary predator of krill, blue whales, who eat 5-20 tons per day during their six-month-or-so annual feeding season, is reduced by 80%, as happened during the 20th century after we figured out how to kill those behemoths?

Everyone says, There will be more krill.

It’s a great chance to elucidate a rare practical use of science. There were actually a lot fewer krill, and scientists recently (by science timing standards) figured out why. Whales don’t just eat krill, they recycle krill nutrients, including tons of iron, which feed phytoplankton, which are the the lowest rung on Earth’s food chain: no phytoplankton, no food, planetwide. Krill also eat phytoplankton, so krill populations were drastically reduced because their own food source declined.

For the kids or the bored or the science-schmience folks we also say, Gigantic whales eat tiny krill, then poop out their nutrients. Even tinier phytoplankton use those to turn sunlight into food in their own bodies, which krill eat. Gigantic whales then eat those krill and the cycle continues.

Reclycling in its ultimate zero-waste form: Mother Nature does it best!

Why aren’t krill recovering now that blue whales are not being slaughtered? The happiest reason in my view is the recovery of these whales, though that is proceeding slowly. The primary reasons are-surprise!–due to the activities of the enormous population of one ape: aquaculture and supplements.

Seafood is so healthy and humans evolved to eat it, and I would really like to eat it, but I rarely do, because it’s just not sustainable. My employer, which is Whole Foods in case you’ve forgotten, doesn’t sell krill-based supplements or foods, and good for it, but it does sell the oxymoronic “sustainably-farmed seafood.” I wish it really was sustainable, but it isn’t, and not just because of krill. Even wild seafood is not sustainably collected, in part because at our rate of extraction, all “fisheries” will eventually collapse,

I also take supplements, but not krill. There’s no nutrient in krill you can’t get somewhere else, obviously, since most locations on the planet aren’t intersection points between humans and krill, especially the species of drill that lives in the Southern Ocean. Human never populated Antarctica, though we are now managing to melt a lot of it.

I know the last thing we need two weeks before the primaries is bad news about krill, but there is a big upside: if you care, all you have to do is not purchase krill-based supplements or farmed seafood! It’s so easy that many of you are probably already there.