In the 20th century, whalers killed roughly 2 million large whales in the Southern Ocean. Some populations, like the Antarctic blue whale, were reduced by more than 99 percent and have been struggling to recover, even though most nations ended commercial whaling in the mid-1980s.
Today a new threat is emerging: industrial fishing for Antarctic krill - tiny swimming crustaceans. Competition with this burgeoning fishery may impede whales' recovery.
In early 2022, I learned about this issue when I was told that he had seen approximately 1,000 fin whales feeding on krill near the South Orkney Islands. This was probably the largest aggregation of baleen whales seen since the 1930s.
Together with colleagues from Stanford and the University of Washington, we wrote about this observation in 2023 to draw attention to the potential threat to recovering populations. We were soon contacted by Sea Shepard Global, who reported that direct overlap between foraging whales and active fishing operations was common.
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