The Krill Paradox
In which we begin with a flashback involving peacocks, then jump to the importance of krill poop to the continuation of human life on Earth.
I’d like to begin this entry with the following disclosure: We’re going to start off with peacocks first, and eventually, we will get to the krill poop. Somewhere along the path of my discovery journey, while I was learning about how vital krill are to the continued survival of planet Earth, I was reminded of this peacock moment from my personal lived history. (Actually, this was something I’d almost entirely forgotten about, until the memory was randomly triggered when I found myself telling the story to a few friends recently.) So, just to prepare you here — we are going to start off with peacocks, and then get to the krill, and by the end, hopefully you will be as in awe of Antarctic krill as I am!
Or at least, hopefully, you will understand why you had to read the phrase “fecal strings,” and maybe forgiven me for it, because of how cool krill are.
Okay, so. THE PEACOCKS: If you ever find yourself locked inside a bathroom of a mobile home trailer with seven baby peacocks in the tub, the primary thing you will notice is how much bird shit there is everywhere. Mainly, the bird shit is inside the bathtub with the baby peacocks, but also, it’s all over the bathroom. At least, if you are me, that is what you will notice, and it will feel like the walls and the ceiling are coated in bird shit and you will be eyeing those seven peachicks with just as much suspicion as they are eyeing you with.
At the time I found myself in this situation, I was around 12 years old, and I knew two things about my older cousin Destiny. One, she wasn’t my actual cousin, and two, to never trust her when she said she had anything regarding animals under control.1 One time she brought home a horse who had cancer thinking she could “nurse it back to health.” Usually, it was safe to go check out whatever her latest animal cause was, as long as you prepared yourself to be saddened by the inevitable tragic state of affairs the animal would be in. This was the first time Destiny had been like “hey, wanna see something cool?” and then proceeded to lock me in a very small bathroom with a very small tub and a very lot of nascent large land birds. To be fair to Destiny, she locked herself in there with me — she said we had to lock the door to make sure the peachicks did not escape, which to me sounded more like she did not trust me to not open the door and let the peachicks out.
Now, if you were thinking of fluffy cute peachicks, think again. These were almost at the stage of attitude-filled scruffy peateens.
This was not my first experience dealing with riled up peafowl. Whenever my uncle was away, I was paid a miserly amount to feed and water the poultry while he was out of town. We lived within walking distance of his country estate,2 so whenever he went off to the stock car races in the desert, I went down the dirt road to get to his house, where I would gladly enter the chicken coop to feed the chickens and then trepidatiously enter the enclosure of the peacock and peahen pair to replenish their food and water trays.
A pissed-off adult peafowl confined to small quarters can really do some damage to a child-sized human, and two of them together are even worse. I would go in with a trash can lid held up in front of me as a shield. Sometimes I’d also carry a broom under my arm, in case of any need for defensive maneuvers. I felt like The Witcher looks when he resignedly gets off his horse to fight another wyrm monster. Battle-scarred (have you seen a peacock’s spurs?!) and road-weary (it wasn’t that long of a walk to get to my uncle’s house, but like, metaphorically).
So, I’d had my dealings with the peacock paternis familias long before Cousin Destiny had arrived on the scene. In fact, Cousin Destiny, while 16 years old and therefore left in charge more often than me, was a complete and total noob when it came to dealing with peafowl. She’d only been living there since her mother dumped my uncle and sort of…left her child behind, and that had not been a very long tenure at the point in which the peafowl somehow managed to bring a brood of eggs to term.
The peachicks had to be removed from their parents when their mother started trying to kill them. This was something the peachicks and I had in common (their mother, trying to kill me. Let’s not get into the topic of my mother, lol), and I felt a small measure of kinship with them based off that. But I also was not too keen on staying locked inside a mobile home trailer bathroom with seven feisty juvenile peafowl and my older cousin, who did not seem to realize that we were in danger.
“Why are they in the bathtub?” I asked, and was answered with a reason that I honestly don’t remember. I hate to break it to you, but I don’t remember what happened to those peachicks, either. I know they got to about the molty-looking level of development, but I have zero memories of their existence after that visual image. It’s possible my cousin Destiny succeeded in one of her endeavors, after all, and raised the peachicks into peateens into peayoungadults that were then given away or sold to my uncle’s friends. Maybe all that happened, and that’s why I never saw them again. We can just go with that explanation and not delve much further into what may or may not have actually happened to the peababes. And we can rejoice that my family moved away when I was almost 15, and I got into babysitting to earn money instead of peacock fighting.
Honestly, the one thing I really wish I could remember about this event is how long it took Destiny to clean out all that peacock shit from the tub, after the peachicks were gone. It was so much bird poop, it felt unreal. In my memory, it’s like a fever dream of screeching chaos and so. much. bird poop. I wish I could remember how long she kept them in the bathtub, and how the hell she convinced my uncle to let her keep them in there. (Cousin Destiny was kind of iconic, actually!)
You may be wondering when I’m going to get to the point about krill that shot the powerful sense memory flash of a peacock shit tub back into my brainpan. I was already interested in euphausiacea (fancy for “krill”) after reading about the arctic subspecies of krill in Ashley Ward’s book The Social Lives of Animals (which I haven’t finished reading yet so no spoilers about the duality of bees, please!). And then, in the midst of my own personal research hole around 2 a.m., I stumbled across a term that made my instincts tingle: the krill paradox. I was immediately intrigued because anything with the word “paradox” in it makes me think of time travel. It turns out, krill have not yet invented time travel (that we know of), but the krill paradox is still deeply interesting to me and, I hope, to you as well!
The krill paradox is the idea that, during the time period of planet-wide whaling, krill should’ve been thriving in higher population numbers, due to the lower numbers of whales floating around to eat them. Like how deer populations started flourishing when we got rid of all the wolves — no predators, no problems! However, this did not actually transpire. Lower whale counts resulted in lower krill populations. Hence, the krill paradox. In other words, when so few whale, why not MORE krill?
So, the average Pacific blue whale eats the equivalent biomass of 3 adult African elephants per day, but instead of elephant, it’s eating tiny krill (and small fish, like anchovies). Scientists figured this out by sticking hundreds of suction-cup sensors onto a bunch of whales, and by using drones, and an echo sounder to measure how much prey is in the area, and collaborating on a 10-year-long project across multiple countries and continents. One of the many reasons I fucking love science (and whale scientists).
Pause for the excellence of the following phrase: baleen whales have what is called a “disproportionate gulp size,” which is what enables them to plow through so much freaking krill every day (seriously, like, the equivalent of 3 adult African elephants each day, but consumed in krill? Krill are so little!). So, the whales eat a lot of krill. And you’d think that, then, during a time period when there were fewer whales due to them being *checks notes* hunted near the point of mass extinction, the krill population would be exploding with lots of krill sex and lots of krill babies. But it was not so!
This is because of what krill eat: phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are microscopic algae that float around in the ocean. AKA, a krill’s favorite salad option. Their growth in the south seas (big baleen whale feeding grounds) is limited by low iron content in the water. Whales pooping in the water introduces iron to counter that deficit, which leads to the growth of more phytoplankton, which leads to more food for the krill, and a krill population increase is great news for the whales because they eat the krill. The fucking circle of life, y’all! It should have a poop at the center!
Now that we know that whale shit is deeply important since it serves as ocean fertilizer, we will go from big poops to tiny poops to talk about the importance of krill shit to the ocean ecosystem/all life on earth.
*deep breath*
The ocean is a giant carbon sink, protecting us atmosphere-dependent species by trapping carbon at the bottom of the sea. One of the ways this happens? KRILL POOP, which is called “fecal strings” for reasons you can probably imagine. 3 Krill swarms, which are the primary way krill like to hang out because lots of them swimming together as a collective reduces their individual chances of getting eaten, result in lots of krill defecating in tandem, which takes carbon from the surface of the ocean and drop drop drops it down into the deep. If you trap the carbon, it is then prevented from being released into the atmosphere, which means it isn’t contributing to the warming of the earth and fast-approaching heat-death of the only habitable planet currently known to humanity. Recent calculations put the amount of carbon krill trap into their shit then drop into the Abyssopelagic Zone at the equivalent of 100 million polar bears worth of carbon per year. That is... a lot of poo.
Even better: any krill fecal string that doesn’t make it to the sea floor makes it into the mouths of many hungry ocean creatures down below, as the fecal strings travel down down down. Krill are nature’s most beneficent and effortless philanthropists! Take THAT, Bill Gates!
Another fun krill fact: krill are extremely powerful swimmers and there are so many of them that they collectively outweigh humanity, in terms of simple biomass. For every human person alive, there are as many as 10,000 krill. I believe we are lucky that krill’s main objectives appear to be “eat, fuck, poop, and be merry,” because there’s enough of them that they might be able to take us out if they ever decided an inter-species war was in the cards.
Okay, last bonus fun fact: krill also transfer carbon to the depths by molting! Their exoskeletons come off regularly throughout their lifecycle, and “their molts are made of chitin, which is a biopolymer containing a lot of carbon.” Imagine if all the dusty gross human skin you shed each year (it’s a lot 4) went to such good use, instead of just piling up inside your home in little skin heaps, doing absolutely nothing for the good of the planet while wreaking havoc on your allergies!
Anyway. That’s how important krill poop is to you, as a resident of this planet. Please don’t tell me anything about composting toilets, as that is immediately where my mind went after learning about how excellent the defecation system is for the whales, krill, and phytoplankton of the Southern Seas. If only all our poops could be as useful as the humble krill’s!
Whale of the Week:
These whales in this one family of orcas who have created whale memes in the wild: multiple generations of the same pod been observed carrying dead fish on their heads, just as a little joke. Dead fish hats for fun!
And now, a note from for our sponsors:
If you’re still a paying subscriber to this newsletter after months of my neglect, thank you, and I don’t know why! If you’d like to unsubscribe to the paid option, it won’t hurt my feelings (because I won’t be looking! I am a delicate flower, a mere soft petal, who cannot burden themselves with looking at the statistics page of the Substack dashboard). If you’d like to keep paying, that would be nice of you! But you don’t have to!
I will not make schedule promises I cannot keep, but I will say, I have two researched drafts in the can, which makes me feel a bit more confident in saying I may be able to get a few more entries out sooner than this most recent gap. Also, I’m off Twitter right now, so if you’d like to share the link to this entry of WormBeauty far and wide, that would be great! Okay, thanks for this talk!
Sources:
Solving the Krill Paradox: Researchers Find Whales Eat (and Poop) Far More Than Previously Thought
Researchers find whales are more important ecosystems engineers than previously thought
Why Krill Swarms Are Important to the Global Climate
Antarctic krill and their role in ocean carbon cycling
How Antarctic krill fertilize the oceans and even store carbon
Cultural Differences in Northwest Orcas
The story of how she’s not my real cousin and why we called her our cousin anyway is too complicated to recount. Also, I’ve changed her name for privacy reasons (and because I don’t trust anyone on that side of the family to not be litigious, if given the slightest opportunity).
By which I mean, a few acres of beer-bottle-littered horse stalls, chicken houses, falling-down outbuildings, derelict cars, and one surprisingly well-built garage (complete with hydraulic lift) that my uncle liked to claim he never paid taxes on. Think Redneck Paradise rather than Jane Austen. The house my family lived in down the road can be best described as “old and filled with rats,” with a single gas heater that would randomly shoot blue flames out of the vents on both sides of the wall.
“What about the rats?” you might be asking? WELL. (—Trigger Warning for Animal Death—) We got a cat and never got her fixed, and she was indoor-outdoor so she kept giving birth and every time we’d talk about keeping one from the litter of kittens and every time they would get eaten by my uncle’s coyote dogs (really they were coyote-shepherd mixes, and that might not have even been true because my uncle was nothing if not a rotten liar) and yet Penny, the original matriarch cat, would remain. A brutal close-up view of the cyclical nature of life and death and triumph played out during every cat breeding season in front of me and my younger siblings. You would think maybe some adult might have noticed that their children kept finding chewed-up, bleeding out kittens, and maybe have done something about it like getting the mama cat fixed to cut off the kitten-to-slaughter pipeline, but that would only have happened in someone else’s childhood, not mine! OBVIOUSLY!
Anyway. The cat was an excellent mouser, and she lived a long and well-fed life, which is more than can be said about generations of her offspring.
Their poop comes out like a tiny string of sausages hanging together. ADORABLE!
You will lose an average of 10 pounds of skin each year of your adult life. Sorry I had to be the one to tell you!