LICENSED TO KRILL
From getting a tattoo that he kept secret from his wife and family to leading Antarctic voyages and advising governments, industry and environmentalists, Stephen Nicol’s life is dominated by a fascinating sea creature
14 One of the world’s leading authorities on this tiny Antarctic critter explains why it is so important to the planet.
Marine scientist Dr Stephen Nicol is a quintessential Hobart slashie, a double threat who bridges science and the arts with ease. Not only one of the world’s foremost experts on krill, he is a fine writer whose new book on his favourite subject — the small, free-swimming Antarctic shrimp Euphausia superba — is packed with wit, wisdom and fascinating science.
Nicol tends to veer between excitement and boredom at the annual two-week Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources conference now under way in Hobart. About 200 international experts have converged in the city for the past 36 years to discuss the krill fishery, for which the commission is responsible, and other issues of Southern Ocean marine management.
“I have now sat through three decades of rather turgid commission meetings and there are times when I feel jaded by the experience,” says the Irish-born Tasmanian, who has spent his career working with krill in Canada and South Africa as well as the Antarctic. “I remain astonished that each year, after two weeks of arcane, intense and often acrimonious discussions, a host of legally binding decisions are made and agreed to, in four languages, by consensus.”
This year, in tea breaks, Nicol will be able to talk about his new book, The Curious Life of Krill, released internationally by US publisher Island Press. And there’s sure to be conversation about Hobart’s potential as a thriving hi-tech Antarctic science hub and tourism gateway, with a dedicated centre appearing a step closer in the latest Macquarie Point masterplan update. As far as Nicol is concerned, the sooner the Australian Antarctic Division moves up to Hobart the better, correcting the serious mistake of locating it “out of sight in a paddock at Kingston”.
Nicol spent 24 years at the AAD headquarters. Retiring from that role in 2011, he is now an adjunct professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. A recipient of the Australian Antarctic Medal for outstanding contributions to research, he advises krill fishery stakeholders and conservationists.
Krill is believed to be the most numerous multi-celled animal on the planet and is a vital species. It is a common mistake, he says, to describe the crustaceans as the base of the food chain. They occupy the middle of a “wasp-waist” ecosystem.
“Where land herbivores are typically large animals, that is not the case in the ocean marine system, where the biggest animals are the carnivores such as whales and sharks,” he explains. “In the ocean marine system, the plants are so small the bigger animals really can’t eat them, so you need something that eats the plants before the animals eat them.The energy from the sun creates a lot of plant life energy concentrated at the bottom [of the chain]. For that energy to reach the top level it needs to go through one species and it is funnelled through krill [which also eat small sea creatures] and up to all these other larger species.”
After decades studying them, Nicol still finds the creatures amazing. He says the best depiction of swarming krill he has seen is not in scientific literature but the film Happy Feet.
A krill tattoo he commissioned for his left arm was meant to be educative and artistic, too.
“Everybody wants to see it,” he chuckles, rolling up his sleeve for me but not the camera. We decide the backdrop of the Aurora Australis, the icebreaker on which he has made many trips to Antarctica, is a seemlier allusion to his work.
not a very good one,” he says of his inking. “I’d always said ‘if one day I’m drunk enough and I have a picture of krill with me and I see a tattoo parlour that I will go in’. It was supposed to be life-size [adult krill grow to 6cm] so that when anyone asked me what krill looks like I could say ‘there you go’, but it’s about three times the size.”
Was he drunk? “No, no, no!” he says, laughing. How old were you when you finally did it? “I am ashamed to say I was 63 or something. It was when I started writing this book the idea percolated into my brain again.”
He kept it secret for a while. “I kept my sleeves down because they don’t look nice to start with, but my wife didn’t even notice the plaster. It was almost Christmas and our daughters were visiting and one evening I couldn’t hide it anymore. We were watching television and my daughter looked across and said: ‘Dad, what’s that on your arm?’ and my wife looked and said ‘Oh my God, when did you get that’ and I said ‘three weeks ago’.”
He feels his wife doesn’t truly approve, but his daughters evidently forgave him sufficiently to agree to proofread his book. While neither is a scientist, they have been part of the krill story all their lives.
Nicol led four major voyages to Antarctica and took part in four others. He endured rather than enjoyed the long, often uncomfortable trips on research vessels including the one docked behind him today on Hobart’s waterfront. For a scientist, he says he was never mad about lab work. What he did love though was writing up his team’s research findings. “Forget the analysis and the stats and all that dull stuff,” he says.
“I didn’t really like the boat trips and I’m hopeless in the laboratory, but I can write.
And so interpreting results is something I really enjoy.”
Over the years he has written popular science articles for
New Scientist and other journals and in the late 1990s he co-authored a group novel about Antarctica. “It got a bit messy,” he says. His latest flourishing as a writer began just before he retired from the AAD, when he took a one-semester creative writing course at the University of Tasmania.
Going on to do his masters, he planned to rewrite an earlier attempt at the great Antarctic novel — a comic one — but ended up with The Curious Life of Krill. He couldn’t help himself.
He takes some strong positions in the book, particularly regarding the environmental management of the krill fishery in the Southern Ocean.
“I wrote this book to set the record straight, because I got very annoyed with everybody getting it wrong and just repeating the same old myths about krill,” he says. “There is an awful lot of nonsense talked about the krill fishery. It’s actually one of the best-managed fisheries in the world, but in the press you read it’s on the point of collapse and about to take down the rest of the ecosystem with it.”
He maintains that stories about krill fishing “taking food out of beaks of penguins” and from whales are largely fabricated, sometimes by people who know better.
It’s the modest scale of fishery that most people and the media don’t appreciate, he says. “[Compare] penguins eating 20 million tonnes of krill a year with the fishery taking [a fraction of that, at] 200,000 tonnes annually.
“And yet people keep saying it’s unsustainable. There will always be people who wish there were no krill fishery at all. Its impact on the rest of the ecosystem is profoundly important, but at its current level, it is indeed sustainable, with the catch less than 0.1 per cent of estimated global krill biomass.”
Spreading the krill fishery so no area is overfished is a goal of the commission, and other restrictions such as avoiding penguin colonies are also increasingly implemented, he says. While complacency is not an option, neither is it helpful to catastrophise.
We need to get the story right in Hobart, he says. “The com“It’s mission is based here and the Australian Antarctic Division is the world centre for krill research, so it’s really important.”
Many believe the Antarctic is a pristine ecosystem. He says they are wrong. “We know that this is far from the case. The first expeditions to the Southern Ocean were commercially motivated, and these pioneers were looking for seals, whales or other species they might be able to harvest. When the populations of seals and then whales were exhausted, extractive industries looked elsewhere.”
While it has supported commercial fishing for decades the Southern Ocean lacks the vast fish populations of the north, such as cod, herring and anchovies. It’s long been known, though, that krill is abundant. Attempts began in the 1970s to turn it into the next great marine protein resource.
Like Nicol’s tattoo, that plan didn’t pan out quite as intended. Krill are notoriously hard to find and catch, for a start. They are small for a commercially harvested species. From the early days, finding a way to make anything of value from their vast population has been a challenge.
Digestive enzymes that are “murderously effective” during their lifetime tend to turn krill rapidly black after death. They are too high in fluoride to eat in large quantities and their fibrous nature can cause digestive problems. And their taste, it must be said, does not tend to have diners rushing back for seconds.
When Nicol visited the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, his hosts served a banquet featuring peeled krill tails, showed him factories producing krill paste and gave him souvenir cans of peeled krill. In Japan that same decade he collected lavish recipe brochures featuring both models in swimsuits and instructions for making krill egg rolls and krill meatballs.
“My poor children got used to me bringing home krill-containing food items that I had discovered … and they became my expert tasting panel,” he remembers. When the girls discovered the occasional hard-to-remove black eyeball staring out, they were looking at yet another impediment for krill as a viable food item. Meanwhile, the farmed shrimp and prawn industry was growing exponentially and producing more desirable products.
“No one could make krill taste very good, though some animals it was fed to were less fussy [including farmed mink in Russia],” says Nicol.
It showed more potential for aquaculture, but this raised environmental concerns as it heightened the prospect of expanded krill fisheries. Krill is a controversial but in some places prized source of nutrition for farmed fish because, as in the wild, eating it turns the flesh of species such as salmon pink. Nicol remembers the CSIRO releasing a report on krill harvest as food for the nascent Tasmanian salmon industry in the 1990s. “It was a very sensitive topic,” he recalls. In Canada, he says, using krill as farmed-fish food is deeply unpopular with conservationists, fishery managers, scientists, fishermen and tourist operators.
Pharmaceuticals and other biochemical products are the latest commercial avenue, with krill oil promoted as having similar benefits as other fish oil, but with the advantage of better absorption. Krill’s limited usefulness to humans thus far, says Nicol, has probably been its greatest protector.
Krill have been around an estimated 20 million years, thriving in ways not fully understood and coping with changes in their physical and biological world, partly perhaps by a pattern of avoidance behaviour — krill tend to stay away from unfavourable environments.
“The main problem, however, is that so many changes are now happening rapidly and simultaneously, not giving animals time to evolve and adapt to new environments,” says Nicol.
“With multiple environmental challenges [including climate change] happening at once, how do we disentangle cause and effect? How do we accommodate the knowledge that some of the most profound changes that will occur in the Southern Ocean over the next few decades may come not from physical changes in the ocean and atmosphere but from the recovery of formerly over-exploited species such as the great whales?”
The Curious Life of Krill, Island Press, $39.99 hardback