Krill

If you want to see wildlife, you think about places like Africa and India.  You don't typically think about Antarctica, but a little know fact is that there are more animals in Antarctica than any of the other six continents.

What is the most successful abundant animal species on earth?  According to the Department of the Environment in Australia, the national geographic and many other knowledgeable sources, the answer is the Antarctic Krill.

I've written a number of articles talking about this animal or that animal that I hope to see on my trip to the south polar region and many (most) of those articles talk about krill being a primary food source.

So what is krill?

Krill are crustaceans, and are related to shrimp and lobster.  There are 85 known species of krill living in every ocean around the world.

Krill are small.  The average one is three quarters on an inch long.  The biggest ones can grow up to about two and a third inches long and weigh less than half an ounce.

Krill are numerous.  They swim together in enormous groups called swarms.  The swarms are so large that they can be seen from space on images taken by satellites.

The most plentiful species of Krill is the Antarctic krill.  If you took all the humans in the world and put them on one side of a balance scale, then put just the krill in Antarctica on the other side, the krill (at less than half an ounce each) is the heaviest.  In fact, the biomass of the krill in Antarctica is greater than the biomass of any other animal species on earth. 

Krill outnumber any other multi-celled species on the planet with somewhere between 32 trillion and 384 trillion of them within the waters of Antarctica alone.  (between 500 million and 6 billion tons)

Finally, there's this:

This is a duck.  They are less plentiful than krill in both biomass and number of individuals.  That said, a baby duck is much cuter than a krill of any age.

and...As my dad used to say...Now you've been educated.