Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

REVIEWS 85

to tempt the nations that had hunted

whales near to extinction. It was rea-

soned that krill must have become es-

pecially plentiful in the absence of their

largest predators and were therefore

ripe for human exploitation. The So-

viet Union led the way with its super

trawlers, taking nearly 500,000 metric

tons of krill at the peak of its efforts in

the 1980s and turning it into krill

paste, krill cheese, and krill flakes, feed-

ing it to livestock, and spreading it over

their fields. A 1975 article in the New

Yo rk Ti m e s lauded krill as an answer to

world hunger, citing an Australian sci-

entist’s calculations that krill “could

provide 20 grams of animal protein

daily for a billion people.”

Continued optimism over the most

abundant source of animal protein in

the world notwithstanding, krill have

proved difficult to crack. When a krill

dies, the powerful enzymes in its belly

that dissolve diatoms turn on and

swiftly autodigest the body. Catches

must be processed immediately to

keep the meat fresh. In 1979, krill

products were found to contain

toothpaste-high quantities of fluoride,

a compound that concentrates in krill

shells, which further set back at-

tempts to create a palatable krill cui-

sine. Aquaculture meal and omega-3

supplements are the two commer-

cially viable products that remain.

Perhaps because the market for these

products increasingly overlaps with

consumers who care about environ-

mental sustainability, the major

krill- fishing nations today—Norway ,

Chile, South Korea, and China—have

begun over the past few years to limit

their operations during the breeding

season on the Antarctic Peninsula,

where they often compete directly

with seals and penguin colonies.

As Nicol notes,

companies continue to fish for krill

for a variety of reasons—some politi-

cal, some because there is a belief

that krill will become more valuable

in the future, and some just because

they want to go krill fishing, and

hang the expense.

M

uch has changed in the

Antarctic over the past two

hundred years. In the 1950s,

a group of Australian biologists toured

the subantarctic islands and took

note of the species that had re-

bounded, as well as those that had

struggled to return to their former

numbers, in some cases over a century

after the sealers and whalers had left.

The legacy of those sealers and whal-

ers has been continued, unintended,

by the stowaways that arrived with

their ships. Invasive rodents and the

cats introduced to control them have

taken a heavy toll on island birds;

since cats were eradicated on Marion

Island, off South Africa, it has once

again been overrun with house mice.

During the meager winters, adult al-

batross, apparently unable to defend

themselves, are routinely nibbled to

death by bands of mice. Rabbits, left

by sealers to breed on Macquarie,

have eaten so much grass that

they’ve caused landslides onto pen-

guin nests. On South Georgia, Lap-

land reindeer were introduced to

provide sport hunting for the home-

sick men at Grytviken. After the

station closed in 1966, the reindeer

grazed unmolested, devastating the

island’s native plants, including

the tussock grasses in which seabirds

nest. Between 2013 and 2014, an erad-

ication team of Norwegian marksmen

removed almost seven thousand rein-

deer from the island and sold the meat

to cruise ships.

Nicol tours Grytviken and is aston-

ished by how much remains of the

factory in King Edward Cove. Whale-

bones and harpoons are strewn every-

where, and the corroded boilers,

tanks, and cranes remind him of

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills.” Consider-

ing not just whales but the repercus-

sions of their absence on the larger

ecosystem, he writes,

To the modern visitor to the Antarc-

tic region it is difficult to comprehend

how different the Southern Ocean

must have looked a hundred years

ago. Accounts of the abundance of

whales seem almost mythical.

The alleged boom in krill popula-

tions, which was supposed to have

followed the decline of the whales,

has turned out to be largely unsup-

ported. Nicol, whose institute holds

the world’s largest trove of whale poop

in its freezers, has embraced an alter-

native theory—that whales fertilize

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