This year, nearly every major krill supertrawler has notified its intention to potentially fish in a region of Antarctica that has seen almost no commercial krill fishing since 1991. One of the world’s most important feeding grounds for endangered blue whales, thousands of nautical miles east of the traditional krill fishing grounds around the Antarctic Peninsula, could now be under threat.

Under the regulations of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), the international body responsible for managing fisheries in the Southern Ocean, fishing vessels must provide advance notification of the areas where they intend to fish for krill during the following season.

For the past several decades, the krill fishery has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the southwest Atlantic, particularly around the Antarctic Peninsula and South Orkney Islands, in what CCAMLR classifies as Area 48.

Until the end of the 2024 fishing season, CCAMLR’s spatial distribution measure, Conservation Measure 51-07, prevented the Area 48 krill catch from becoming excessively focused in any one place. Although the overall catch trigger limit was 620,000 tonnes, the measure placed additional limits on how much of that catch could be taken from each of the four subareas.

Devastatingly, CCAMLR failed to reach consensus to renew the measure, and it expired at the end of 2024. The overall 620,000-tonne catch limit remained, but the safeguards governing its spatial distribution disappeared.

The consequences were immediately apparent. For the first time, the entire catch could theoretically be taken from much smaller areas where whales, penguins and seals gather in the greatest numbers to feed. This concentration of trawling intensified the very localized fishing pressures that the spatial distribution safeguards were designed to prevent and coincided with the unprecedented early closure of the fishery last season, when the 620,000-tonne catch limit was reached well before the end of the fishing season.

The fact that much of the industrial krill fleet is now reserving the option to move fishing effort eastward into the Indian Ocean sector of Antarctica could therefore indicate that operators are preparing for a future in which the 620,000-tonne Area 48 catch limit is increasingly reached well before the end of the fishing season.

Crucially, the 620,000-tonne catch limit applies only to Area 48. Divisions 58.4.1 and 58.4.2, where the vessels have now also notified an intention to fish, are subject to separate catch limits that currently allow for a combined take of up to 892,000 tonnes.

If substantial krill fishing were to begin there, it would represent not only a major geographic expansion of the modern industrial krill fishery into an area that has experienced virtually no sustained commercial exploitation for more than three decades, but also, in effect, more than double the amount of krill the industry is currently permitted to extract without increasing the Area 48 trigger limit. Rather than securing consensus to raise catch limits in the heavily scrutinized waters of the Antarctic Peninsula, the industry could instead achieve the same outcome simply by expanding into a far less studied, but equally ecologically significant, region of East Antarctica.

Unlike the Antarctic Peninsula, which provides critical foraging grounds for fin whales, East Antarctica is one of the world’s most important feeding grounds for blue whales, the great whale species that has shown the slowest recovery since the end of commercial whaling.

Read more about Sea Shepherd Global's Antarctica Defense Campaign