Antarctic Thesaurus
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katabatic krill krill cycles Krill growth krill song krill watching
krill
Jan Chaffey, Krill
Misunderstood species, central to system
Christchurch, 2008
KRILL are greatly misunderstood creatures;
they are not passive drifters.
Central to Antarctic ecosystems,
there is no terrestial equivalent.
No natural history exists to describe what goes on in the ocean.
Measured today in terms of biomas and tonnage,
we fail to value krill as individuals.
Krill are sentient beings,
shifty little things that do not want to be caught.
Notes by artist Jan chaffey, from hearing the scientist Steve Nicol present his paper, From Beautiful creatures to Particles - How Scientific terminology & Methodoloogy Significantly affects our Perception of Marine Animals. Imagining Antarctica conference, Canterbury University, New Zealand, September 2008.
Out of sight...
The word 'krill' comes from the sound they make skittering over the water's surface, which sounds like a Norwegian word.
It is misleading to call a krill a zooplankton, which is comonly known as a drifting creature, unable to move of its own accord. The term zooplankton is pretty meaningless anyway. It simply means 'anything caught in a zooplankton mesh'.
Krill can behave as individuals, and together as a superorganism. They can, for example, move away from predators such as whales.
It is important how the natural world is portrayed. Scientists can mistake models for reality, and the public can take that on board.
Our perceptions of krill have changed over time, through the way it has been represented: from a beautiful animal, alive with its own behaviours, to a mass of anonymous particles, to be counted and weighed for analysis.
Complexity can lead to simplification, which commonly leads to mistakes. For example, T.S. Huxley's pronouncement, that the supply of fish in the sea was inexhaustable, was based on a simplified understanding of how the oceasn work.
My notes taken from hearing the scientist Steve Nicol present his paper, From Beautiful creatures to Particles - How Scientific terminology & Methodoloogy Significantly affects our Perception of Marine Animals. Imagining Antarctica conference, Canterbury University, New Zealand, September 2008.
