“If you explore the fishing patterns in the last 10
or 15 years, they have been consistently going to
the same spots,” says César Cárdenas, of the Chil-
ean Antarctic Institute. He’s working on plans for
the protected area. Fishing fleets favor the richest
areas for krill, where whales and penguins go to
feed. A 2020 analysis of more than 30 years of
monitoring data indicated that when local krill
catch rates are high, penguins do poorly accord-
ing to a suite of measures including the weight of
their fledglings and their breeding success.
Restricting krill fishing in certain parts of the
protected area can help ensure the krill popula-
tions stay robust in places where parent penguins
forage, so they don’t have to compete with fishing
boats in securing food for their young.
With the scientific basis of the Antarctic Pen-
insula MPA in place, the next step lies largely
within the political sphere—reaching consensus
among all members of the commission. Given
the importance of krill fishing, vigorous discus-
sions are likely to lie ahead—especially if negoti-
ations for the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected
Area, which came into play four years ago after
protracted wrangling, are any indication.
THE ROSS SEA is a deep embayment of Antarctica
between Marie Byrd Land and Victoria Land,
2,300 miles south of Christchurch, New Zealand.
Dubbed the “Last Ocean” because of its remark-
ably untouched nature, it’s considered one of the
last large intact marine ecosystems left on Earth.
Huge numbers of top predators roam its waters:
orcas, snow petrels, Weddell seals, emperor and
Adélie penguins.
“It has a disproportionate amount of all the
amazing marine life that we know Antarctica
for,” says Cassandra Brooks, a University of Col-
orado Boulder marine scientist who has worked
in the Southern Ocean since 2004. “It really was
this place that the international community ral-
lied around,” she says.
The Ross Sea became a top priority for protec-
tion because of climate change and a commercial
fishery for Antarctic toothfish that was burgeon-
ing in the mid-2000s. Even so, it took more than
10 years of scientific planning and five years of
intense negotiations by the Commission for
the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living
Resources for the Ross Sea MPA to be adopted.
Discussions stalled over fishing rights and
the MPA’s boundaries, and bit by bit, the
original parameters changed. Major fishing
nations—including Norway and South Korea—
cooperated when the MPA was reduced by 40
percent. (Later additions brought the total area
back up.) The Ross Sea has no commercial krill
fishery, but that option was kept open. Desig-
nation of a krill research zone and agreement
that krill could be caught in the toothfish fishing
zone helped gain China’s support in 2015.
Russia, the last holdout, chaired the commis-
sion’s October 2016 meeting, in Hobart, Tasma-
nia. Final adjustments included a sunset clause
of 35 years, when the Ross Sea protections will
come up for review.
At the end of the two-week meeting, mem-
bers announced the Ross Sea MPA. It’s the
world’s largest marine protected area, covering
approximately 589,000 square miles of ocean120 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC