Giving Compass' Take:

· Historically, the abundant population of Antarctic krill has been known to be highly adaptive and play a critical role in the marine ecosystem. Now, Stephen Nicol, a krill biologist, suggests that the many changes happening to the environment pose a real challenge to the future of krill and the marine wildlife that feeds on them. 

· What can donors do to help protect the ocean and marine animals? How can we help preserve the Antarctic ecosystem?

· Read more about the effects of climate change on life in the Arctic.

Antarctic krill are among the world’s most abundant animals and have a critical role in the Antarctic ecosystem, but their environment is changing rapidly. There is a tendency to view environmental change as a threatening process, but for adaptable animals, like krill, it may end up being challenging rather than life-threatening.

Over millennia krill have thrived, rather than being threatened by every change in their challenging physical and biological world, but how they have done this is yet unknown.

Their history in the Antarctic is opaque. In a confounding quirk of krill, we have been unable to find any fossil record for any species of krill that would assist us in learning how they have reacted to historical changes. We know that Antarctic krill probably emerged about 20 million years ago, but how the population responded to the tumultuous changes that have occurred since then is a mystery. We do know that krill are remarkably successful, so they must have considerable powers of adaptation, and this gives me some hope for their future.

The main problem, however, is that so many changes are now happening rapidly and simultaneously. Animals can adapt to slow change over evolutionary periods, and animals with short life spans can adapt the fastest. Unfortunately, because krill are long-lived, their ability to adapt to rapid change might be limited.

Read the full article about Antarctic krill Stephen Nicol at News Deeply.