A revised precautionary catch limit for Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) in the Scotia Sea of 4 million tons was recently adopted by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). The limit was based on a total biomass of 44.3 million tons, as estimated from an acoustic and net survey of krill across the Scotia Sea sector of the Southern Ocean, and a harvest rate of 9.1%, as determined from an analysis of the risks of exceeding defined conservation criteria. We caution, however, that before the fishery can expand to the 4-inillion-ton level it will be necessary to establish mechanisms to avoid concentration of fishing effort, particularly in proximity to colonies of land-breeding krill predators, and to consider the effects of krill immigrating into the region from multiple sources.

Hewitt, R.P., J.L. Watkins, M. Naganobu, P. Tshernyshkov, A.S. Brierley, D.A. Demer, S. Kasatkina, Y. Takao, C. Goss, A. Malyshko, M.A. Brandon, S. Kawaguchi, V. Siegel, P.N. Trathan, J.H. Emery, I. Everson, and D.G.M. Miller. 2002. Setting a precautionary catch limit for Antarctic krill. Oceanography 15(3):26–33, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2002.12.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.