The huge trawlers move forward, slowly. Just a short distance from one another, each brand their nets – hundreds of metres in length – before submerging them in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean.

They are here to harvest the life beneath the waves, catching entire schools of krill (Euphasia superba), a species of small shrimp unique to this region but that which forms the basis of an entire food system for local fauna, including penguins, seabirds, seals, and whales.

In 2023, the Bob Brown Foundation working in partnership with the Sea Shepherd captured footage of these vessels in action around the Antarctic Peninsula, the westernmost region of Antartica. Two years later, and it’s in this precise section of the ocean that the majority of krill fishing has been concentrated for the first half of 2025.

Such has the extent of krill fishing here been that it didn’t take long for fleets to reach a record catch of 620,000 tonnes – an unprecedented figure – within just a few short months. Alarmed at the magnitude of the harvest within such a small time scale, the precautionary closure of the fishery was triggered by August 1st.

Of course, reaching that trigger level has long been recognised by NGOs as a real possibility. The rapid technological and expansion of the krill fishing fleet has – for a long time – foretold the story of overfishing across this patch of the Southern Ocean.

“It’s something the NGO community has always been very vocal about,” says Nicholas Kirkham, a senior officer at Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy. “For a long time, we have sounded the call to manage the increasing capacity of the fishing industry.”

By the time August came rolling around, the cost of the krill fishery mismanagement was laid bare for all to see.

Krill fishing dates back to the 1970s, when it was initiated by the Soviet Union. It’s over the course of the last 15 years that it has seen an explosion on an industrial scale. Driven by investments – primarily made by the industry’s largest player, Aker (a multinational company based in Norway which operates mainly within oil and gas but has hands in both salmon farming and krill fishing through its subsidiary, Aker Qrill) – the business of krill fishing has up-scaled.

Today, there are 14 vessels allowed to trawl for krill in the Southern Ocean operating under the flags of Chile, China, South Korea, Norway, and Ukraine. But the fleet continues to grow: China launched its latest vessel earlier this year, while Norway’s Aker Qrill – which accounts for nearly 70% of krill catches in the Southern Ocean – has announced the launch of a new trawler in 2026.

“We see increased interest from aquaculture – primarily salmon farming – especially in Chile and Norway. Today, Norway is the biggest fisher of krill in the world,” says Kirkham. “But we’re also seeing an increased demand in China.”

The largest market for both krill meal and oil is within salmonid fish farming, with the omega3 an pet food industries not far behind. In August this year, researchers associated with Aker Qrill published a study in the scientific journal Aquaculture in which they presented the “benefits of krill products” and its positive impact on the growth, health, and fillet quality of farmed non-salmonid fish.” It’s the position of many global NGOs that this was little more than a clear-cut attempt to increase the market for krill.

Not that it needs much encouragement. Krill catches in Antarctica have grown steadily in recent years, rising from 106,000 tonnes in 2006 to 518,000 tonnes in 2025.

This year – for the first time – catches reached the legal limit of 620,000 tonnes (a limited established by the Convention for the Protection of Antarctic Marine Living Resources or CCAMLR – an international body comprising 26 countries and the European Union, which is mandated to protect marine ecosystems and regulate human activities in the Southern Ocean) by the year’s half-way point. 

Reaching that limit was always an inevitability. What has surprised many, however, is that it was reached so soon. It was, until now, common perception that the threshold wouldn’t be reached for another three to five years.

What should come as little surprise to anyone is the anger this has all provoked among those in both the scientific and NGO communities. Those that stand to feel the devastating impact of this level of overfishing will be wildlife that depend on these once-rich waters for the critical feeding grounds that they provide.

Recounting his experience of the fishing effort documented back in 2022 and 2023, Alistair Allan, Antarctic Director at the Bob Brown Foundation admits that he was “blown away” by what he saw, “amazed” by the concentration of fishing effort in this small patch of ocean.

Working alongside the Sea Shepherd, Allan and his team had spent weeks filming the fishing activity around the Antarctic Peninsula, carefully documenting the extent to which the vessels were concentrated close to land and critically, close to whale feeding grounds.

“We saw ship after ship trawling, fishing one after the other, eight super-trawlers in a small area,” Allan recalls.

It’s owing to this level of concentrated fishing effort here around the Antarctic Peninsula that this year’s record catch was achieved in just seven months. That, and an abject failure among members countries at the last CCAMLR meeting (held in October 2024 in Hobart, Australia) to renew conservation measures that would have seen fishing efforts better distributed across the Southern Ocean.

“A consensus wasn’t reached, so the conservation measure that could have spread the catch out across the Southern Ocean just didn’t roll over,” says Kirkham. It’s therefore unsurprising that – lacking the protection measures to better manage the fishing effort – that fishing was concentrated in such a way. “It’s exactly what NGOs and the CCAMLR worked hard – over many years – to achieve, to put a conservation measure in place that would avoid this level of fishing. So it’s quite concerning.”

It was early on in the year that Philip Trathan, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, led a study highlighting the impact of krill fishing on baleen whale populations within the region. Alongside the research came the recommendation that the CCAMLR take greater account of the these populations.

“The fishery operates close to shore and over the continental shelf in three key areas: around the Antarctic Peninsula, around the South Orkney Islands, and around South Georgia,” explains Trathan. “Those are areas that are really important for many different species, such as fish, seabirds including penguins, and seals and whales.”

It’s according to Trathan that the impact of this excessive fishing upon some of those whale populations is already being felt. “There are clear signs that pregnancy rates among humpback whales are declining,” he says. “And that might suggest that krill is now becoming limiting for that species.”

The krill fishing industry promotes itself as sustainable, a position it markets via figureheads at the Association of Responsible Krill Fisheries (ARK). While the Association doesn’t deny that krill catch levels in the Antarctic fishery have been steadily rising over the last 15 years, its position is that the current trigger level is not reflective of the science.

In a written response to a request for comment, Javier Arata, executive director of ARK said that given the steady rise in catch levels of the last 15 years, “reaching the trigger level is not a surprise”, adding that ARK has been campaigning for many years for the CCAMLR to adopt a revised “Krill Fishery Management Approach” which would not only ‘allow for different resource management’ but “increase a maximum catch limit, thus preventing early closures in the future.”

“The trigger level was always intended as an interim measure and does not reflect the science-based management framework,” says Arata.

Yet it is according to scientists such as Trathan that quite to the contrary, “catches should remain low until that science is in place” to better understand the impact of krill harvesting on whale and penguin populations.

At this year’s United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice, France, several groups and personalities, including renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle and actor Benedict Cumberbatch, called for a complete ban on krill fishing, lambasting the industry as a “non-essential activity” that is impacting one of the most fragile ecosystems on the system – one made more so by the worsening climate crisis.

“If you look at where krill goes, it’s into things that we really do not need,” says Alistair Allan. “It’s not providing an essential foundation for global food security; it’s not feeding the world. It’s been put into pet food, it’s put into salmon aquaculture to feed farmed fish, and it goes into supposed health supplements.”

And while those markets continue to grow, the biodiversity dependent upon krill as the basis of a critical and fragile food web suffer. In June this year, a study published in Nature indicated that emperor penguin populations are now on a steeper decline than it was once believed. Researchers have put this down to a confluence of factors, including “habitat loss in Antarctica arising from warming oceans and the loss of seasonal sea ice.” Competition for a critical food source is the last thing the species needs.

“From both a moral and philosophical point of view, we should actually be leaving parts of the ocean that are already facing these huge challenges, to just do the best they can to survive.”