What's happening to the krill?
More baby whales today – in total we saw three pods of humpback whales today, all were mother and calf pairs. The babies were very playful and seemed to be practicing their breaches, jumping high up in to the air, many times in a row. Meanwhile the mums were just cruising slowly, resting or sleeping.
It’s fantastic to see so many calves coming through at the moment, giving a good indication how well this population is breeding and recovering. We have almost 20,000 humpbacks in the East Australian population again this year, which is certainly a long way up from the few hundred that were left after whaling stopped in the mid-1960s. Of course whales are now protected in most parts of the world, only very few countries still hunt them. But they still face a number of other threats, largely due to increasing human impacts. These include boat strikes – people driving too fast, not looking out for animals around them – and entanglement in fishing line or gear, including shark nets like the ones we have off the Gold Coast and other beaches around Australia.
A new big threat to the whales is that they are starting to lose their food source! Most of the great whale species predominantly eat krill (small shrimp) which have always been abundant in their feeding areas off Antarctica. But these days krill stocks are actually declining. A major reason for that is the increase in krill fisheries to supply the growing demand for krill oil tablets and similar food supplement products. Ironically krill oil has not actually been shown to have any substantial health benefits for humans (certainly none you couldn’t achieve by having a balanced healthy diet) – when you think about it, in the history of humankind, when have we ever eaten krill?? But suddenly media and TV advertising are telling us it’s a necessary addition to our diet… I’m finding that hard to believe. However, krill certainly is the main diet of the whales and also most other animals in the Antarctic ecosystem: fish eat krill, bigger predators like dolphins, seals, sharks eat the fish that eat the krill… They are all directly or indirectly dependent on that krill, it is the very basis of the Antarctic food web. And now we’re removing that foundation of the food web just for something unnecessary like krill oil tablets! Think twice before you buy these sorts of products, as they are having a very negative impact on all sorts of animals including our own humpback whales that migrate to Antarctica to feed!
Eco Ranger Ina