Krillzyme

Sourcing

Taking from the bottom of a food web

Antarctic krill is not a fish stock like any other. It is the animal that almost everything else in the Southern Ocean eats. Any company selling krill oil owes you a straight answer about what that means.

What krill are

Euphausia superba is a shrimp-like crustacean about six centimetres long, living in swarms dense enough to be visible from space. Estimates of total Antarctic krill biomass run to several hundred million tonnes, making it plausibly the most abundant wild animal species on the planet by mass.

It is also the load-bearing species of the entire ecosystem. Baleen whales, crabeater seals, penguins, flying seabirds, squid and fish all depend on it, many almost exclusively. Remove krill and the Southern Ocean stops working.

How the fishery is governed

The krill fishery is managed by CCAMLR — the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources — an international body established specifically because the Antarctic needed a management regime that considered the whole ecosystem rather than one target species.

The key feature of CCAMLR’s approach is that the catch limit is not set at the maximum the krill population could sustain. It is set well below that, explicitly to leave enough for the predators that depend on it. In practice the actual annual catch has been a small fraction of a percent of estimated biomass — a far more conservative ratio than almost any other commercial fishery in the world.

<1% The order of magnitude at which the annual krill catch sits relative to estimated Antarctic krill biomass. For comparison, many conventional fisheries operate at exploitation rates one to two orders of magnitude higher.

The parts that are genuinely contested

A sustainability page that only lists reassurances isn’t worth reading. These are the real open questions:

  • Concentration, not total volume, is the concern. The overall catch is small, but fishing effort clusters in a few productive areas — often the same areas where penguin colonies feed during breeding season. Localised depletion can matter even when the basin-wide figure looks safe.
  • Climate is the larger threat. Krill depend on sea ice for the algae their larvae feed on. Warming and ice loss in the western Antarctic Peninsula affect the population far more than fishing does. Buying less krill oil does not fix that; it is worth being clear that fishing is the smaller variable.
  • Biomass estimates carry uncertainty. Surveying krill across the Southern Ocean is difficult and expensive, and estimates are updated infrequently. Conservative catch limits are partly an acknowledgement of that uncertainty.

What to look for in any krill product

Rather than ask you to take our word for it, here is what to check — on our product or anyone else’s:

  1. MSC certification. The Marine Stewardship Council certifies the major Antarctic krill fisheries. It is independently audited and the chain of custody is traceable.
  2. A named harvesting partner. Vague language about “sustainably sourced Antarctic waters” with no named fishery or vessel operator is a claim with nothing behind it.
  3. Voluntary buffer zones. Several operators have voluntarily agreed to stop fishing near penguin breeding colonies during the breeding season, going beyond what regulation requires.
Ask us Want the specifics of our supply chain — the fishery, the certification, the vessel operator? Ask and we’ll tell you. A brand that won’t name its source hasn’t earned the word sustainable.

Whether to take krill oil at all

If ecosystem impact is your primary concern, the lowest-impact omega-3 is algal oil — EPA and DHA grown in fermentation tanks, which is where the fish get theirs from in the first place. It skips the ocean entirely. It costs more per gram and doesn’t have the phospholipid structure, but it’s the honest answer to that question, and we’d rather give it than pretend the question doesn’t exist.

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