While I Rest, the Southern Ocean Does Not

I am home.

For the first time in months there is no mornings with VHF radio crackling in the background, no wind speed displayed on a bridge screen, no decision to be made about ice conditions or landing windows. The rhythm of an expedition leader life — intense, relentless, beautiful — has paused. I rest.

And in the stillness, there is more space to reflect.

The Southern Ocean, however, does not pause the way I do. While I sit with a cup of coffee to greet the day in my garden and let my nervous system soften, fleets continue to move across the waters of the Drake and the Scotia Sea and along the Antarctic Peninsula. Not the ships I like to see, the ones full of dreams and expectation on seeing unmatched beauty in a pristine remote continent. These ones carry nets. Nets that descend into the cold, black depths and mine for the gold of Antarctica.

They are looking for krill.

If it's the first time you hear this word, let me tell you about krill. Antarctic krill — Euphausia superba — are small, almost translucent crustaceans, no longer than a finger at its best. To the untrained eye, they are almost invisible. My clients on expeditions rarely notice them unless we show them.

Cameras rarely capture tiny life down south unless we switch on the onboard microscope and we talk about diatoms, copecods, and other magic passwords to tiny worlds. I usually make sure we make time for this every expedition. Opening the door to the micro world of the Antarctic ecosystem is not an activity to fill a gap in the daily program — it can be as mind-changing as any landing.

Krill are not as micro but very unnoticed creatures for the most part. Yet, they are the pulse of Antarctica.

Credit: Antarctic and Southern Oceans Coalition

Their total biomass is estimated to be greater than that of any other wild animal population on Earth (let that sink in!). Whales return each summer to gorge on them. Penguins time their breeding to their availability. Seals, fish, seabirds — entire ecosystems — are threaded together by this single species.

I have watched humpbacks bubble-net feeding in the bays at the Peninsula, lunging upward through orange clouds of krill like underwater fireworks. I have seen Adélie penguins in the remotes corners they chose as homes, porpoising through brash ice, returning from feeding trips as if late for an important meeting. And any who visits Antarctica, or even see it on social media, will fall in love with these scenes. What they rarely see is what sustains them.

I am aware that I speak from a position of privilege.I often get to witness scenes most people only see in documentaries — dramatic music included in my head! Antarctica is not an easy place to reach. It requires time, logistics, and a certain stubborn love for remote places. For many, it will remain something glimpsed through a screen.

Part of my role — and one I take seriously — is to be a warm window into that world. "Antarctic Ambassador" is a real concept for me, not a hashtag.

To describe what happens beyond the cinematic breaches and golden sunsets. To point out that beneath every whale lunging through the surface lies a dense, shimmering cloud of krill. That beneath every bustling penguin colony lies a feeding ground invisible to the eye, its my duty now more than ever.

Krill will never star in their own nature series. They drift. They pulse. They glow faintly in cold water. They do not leap or roar, or have relatable eyes for humans. But without them, there would be no spectacle.

Lets get a bit more serious now, Krill fishing is regulated under the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), often described as one of the most precautionary fisheries management systems in the world. Catch limits exist. Science is consulted. Monitoring occurs -Allegedly-. On paper, it can sound reasonable. But ecosystems are not spreadsheets.

Krill harvests are concentrated in areas where whales, penguins and seals depend on predictable summer abundance. At the same time, climate change is altering sea-ice dynamics, particularly along the western Antarctic Peninsula. Krill larvae rely on winter sea ice for survival. Less ice means weaker recruitment. Weaker recruitment means less resilience. Extracting pressure plus climate pressure, that not a great scenario.

Removing krill from the Antarctic ecosystem is akin to tugging at a thread in a woven system. The fabric may not tear immediately, but its strength is no longer the same. Slowly, carefully, almost imperceptibly — one day it holds no more. We have seen this before — in images of the Amazon being swiped to the ground, in oil-darkened pelicans after Deepwater Horizon, in coral reefs that shifted from brilliant color to bone-white within a single lifetime. Systems do not always collapse in a single dramatic moment. More often, they weaken until the change becomes impossible to ignore.

Abundance in Antarctica can look infinite. Water turns red-gold beneath the surface. It is easy to believe there will always be more. We once believed the same about whales.

The recovery of whale populations in recent decades is one of the Southern Ocean’s quiet triumphs. Each season I see more blows on the horizon. That recovery depends on prey availability. It depends on krill.

This can be such a distant problem for you, believe me is not.

From where I stand — having watched whales feed, having stood among thousands of penguins, having seen how fragile sea ice can be — Is easy to assume I do not believe we need to extract from that foundation. But this is a fact: There is no essential human need that justifies mining the base of one of the planet’s last largely marine ecosystems, which has the not minor task of keep the global life balance.

Credit: Seasheperd Goblal

Healthy systems depend on rhythm. Work and rest. Growth and recovery. Antarctica evolved under extreme seasonality — light and darkness, heavy ice and open water. Climate change is already bending those rhythms. I am resting now. The expeditions will begin again soon enough for me. I will return to the bridge, to the radio, to the winds of the Drake. But the Southern Ocean does not rest from human extraction activity now, and it should.

Krill may be small, almost invisible to most who visit Antarctica. Yet they carry extraordinary weight. They are the hinge upon which an entire marine system turns.

When we speak about protecting Antarctica, perhaps the truest measure is how we treat what lies at the base — the small, the unseen, the foundational. This is not an "activist article" is just a reasonable one.

What you can do? be aware first. Act within your reach, even from the confort of your home you can make a difference like going to all online patforms that are speaking up, sign their petitions; support the ones documenting activities in the cold a little as a meal out match amount still makes difference. Talk about it!. Choose your products wisely. Appreciate your world, be curious and kind.