Live a life as an Antarctic krill

A finger-length crustacean that feeds whales, penguins and seals. About 3.8 × 10¹⁴ Antarctic krill are alive right now.

Sources: Antarctic krill biomass of ~379 million tonnes (Atkinson et al. 2009, Marine Ecology Progress Series 362) at roughly 1 g each (order of magnitude only).

Your life

1. Day 1 · You are an egg released at the surface of the Scotia Sea. You sink: hundreds of metres, sometimes more than a kilometre.
2. Week 1 · You hatch in the deep and spend weeks swimming upward, living on yolk, molting as you rise.
3. Winter · Your first winter. You graze the algae growing under the sea ice.
4. Year 1 · You join a swarm so dense it turns the water red, billions of krill moving as one.
5. Year 2 · A shadow. A whale lunges through the swarm, swallowing tonnes of krill in a single gulp.
6. Year 3 · Food is short this winter. You do something few animals can: you shrink, molting into a smaller body.
7. Year 4 · You spawn thousands of eggs into the summer sea.
8. Year 5 · You are old for a krill. You have molted dozens of times.

Get rebornEvery number and its source