The KrillSeeker Lab

Why do krill descend to the seafloor, and how widespread is this benthic behavior? Using ROV Subastian aboard the RV Falkor (too), this project investigates how Antarctic krill use deep-sea habitats—what resources they access, what risks they face, and how common this strategy might be. These insights will strengthen our understanding of krill population dynamics and improve biomass estimates critical for ecosystem conservation and fishery management.

How do changes in the environment ripple up from krill to blue whales? This project combines physiology, behavior, and ecology to explore how shifting ocean conditions affect krill availability and quality—and how those changes impact blue whale health and resilience in New Zealand’s South Taranaki Bight. By integrating data across three years, we aim to develop predictive Species Health Models that link prey and predator responses to rapid climate change.

As rapid warming transforms the northern Antarctic Peninsula, understanding how environmental variability affects krill reproduction is critical for effective ecological forecasting and fishery management. This project uses preserved krill samples from across seasons to assess key reproductive stages in females and test how winter-summer conditions influence spawning timing and duration. The findings will improve population models essential for managing the Antarctic krill fishery under changing climate conditions.

The overwinter survival of juvenile krill is tightly linked to what they eat in autumn—but we don’t yet know how diet quality shapes their energy use, condition, and resilience through the polar night. This project combines long-term feeding experiments and field sampling during winter at Palmer Station to understand how different food sources influence krill physiology and energy budgets. The results will inform theoretical models of krill growth and survival, helping predict how climate-driven shifts in food availability may reshape the Antarctic ecosystem.