US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this week granted Aker BioMarine’s request for re-examination of US patent number 8,030,348 assigned to competitor Neptune Technologies and Bioressources. The re-examination was approved for all 21 claims of the patent and in consideration of multiple references presented by Aker BioMarine.
An international group of scientists has shown that many seabirds begin to suffer when the food available for them in the ocean declines below a critical level. This level is about one-third of the maximum measured amount of food available. They have found that this critical level is about the same for seabird species around the world. Their study — the most comprehensive ever undertaken — covers birds from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
A number of penguin species found in western Antarctica are declining as a result of a fall in the availability of krill, a study has suggested. Researchers, examining 30 years of data, said chinstrap and Adelie penguin numbers had been falling since 1986.
In a world first, the sex life of Antarctic Krill in the wild has been caught on camera revealing the shrimp-like creatures are able to mate deeper in the ocean than previously thought.
By Susan Moran - They’re called the krillers around Palmer Station, because they’re always on the hunt for Antarctic krill: tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans that form the foundation of the Antarctic food web.
The two South Georgia Island King Edward Point (KEP) based scientists are undertaking regular winter survey work at sea to investigate the spatial overlap between the winter krill fishery and the distribution of foraging predators and fish larvae in South Georgia waters, reports the SG newsletter.
China has sent its ocean-going fishing vessels Kai li and An Xin Hai to the Antarctic for the 2010 krill fishing season. During a 23 day exploratory fishing they caught 2.000 tons of krill, with a daily output of 100 tons, three times than originally expected.