• Krill is the cornerstone of the Antarctic’s ecology. Seals, whales, penguins and many other seabirds depend on it for their basic food.
• The Wandering albatross, with a 3.5metre wingspan, is the largest seabird in the world. Satellite tracking has shown that the Wandering albatross can reach an amazing 88 km per hour and keep flying for days at a time at an average speed of over 30km per hour.
• Crabeater seals number 14-30 million, making them the commonest large mammals on Earth after humans and despite their name, crabeater seals eat krill.
• The total world population of Chinstrap penguins is estimated to be about 6.5 million and all but about 10,000 nest on the Antarctic Peninsula or the islands nearby.
• Many Antarctic invertebrates living in the Southern Ocean are scavengers, feeding on anything that has died and sunk to the seabed, such as a penguin carcass. They also feed on anything discarded and seal faeces are an important source of food!
• The total number of Emperor penguins is unknown because new colonies are still being discovered, but there may be 135,000 – 175,000 pairs breeding in approximately 40 sites around the Antarctic continent.
• Apart from seals, the baleen and toothed whales are the only mammals indigenous to the Antarctic. The majority of the toothed whales are far smaller than most of the baleen whales and so few of the toothed whales were ever hunted.
• The massive reduction in the stock of whales as a result of commercial whaling activities is the single largest human impact to the Southern Ocean ecosystem.

Sperm Whale

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