Conservationists and industry clash over krill trawling  April 22, 2026

 

Rise up sunshine, I'm Coy Wire, this is CNN 10, and today we are going big. As in 25,000 miles circumference, planet-sized big, happy Earth Day. The one day where about 8.3 billion teammates share the same home field advantage and same responsibility.

 

circumference [sɚˈkʌmfǝrǝns] n. 圆周；周长

 

From the deepest oceans, to the highest mountaintops, to baby animals taking their first steps, today this show is a reminder that this planet isn't just where we live, it's who we are. We begin in the world's largest ecosystem, the ocean, where some of the smallest critters, like paper clip small, make a huge difference. Antarctic krill.

 

paper clip 纸夹；回形针

krill [krɪl] n. 磷虾

 

These tiny crustaceans are the power bar of the Antarctic food chain.

 

crustacean [krʌsˈtеʃǝn] n. 甲殼綱動物

power bar 能量棒

 

The primary food source for everything from tuxedo wearing penguins to the heavyweight champ of the animal kingdom, the blue whale. A single blue whale can eat up to four tons of krill in one day.

 

That's like eating the weight of 4,000 medium-sized pizzas per day. But krill are now facing growing pressure from industrial krill operations. Trawlers are harvesting more than half a million tons of them each year.

 

trawler [ˈtrɔlɚ] n. 拖网渔船

 

We went one-on-one with Greenpeace co-founder, Captain Paul Watson, whose foundation is working to protect this fragile food chain, and his approach is anything but conventional.

 

anything but 恰恰不；根本不；決不

 

The primary purpose for the krill is to convert it into a cheap protein feed for salmon farms around the world. And it's a Norwegian industry, primarily, as the salmon farms.

 

And this is a Norwegian industry doing the krill exploitation. So for us to have cheap salmon, it means that we're going to have to starve the penguins and the whales down in the Southern Ocean.

 

exploitation [ˌɛksplɔɪˈtеʃǝn] n. 剝削

 

Now, your missions, quote, block, harass, do everything we can to stop industrial krill fishing.

 

harass [həˈræs] v. 不断骚扰

 

But your focus remains on this direct action, nonviolent campaign. How do these missions work, and how effective are they?

 

Well, 50 years ago, I developed a strategy, which I call aggressive nonviolence, to aggressively intervene, but to make sure that nobody is injured, and to stay within the boundaries of the law and the boundaries of practicality.

 

intervene [ˌɪntɚˈvin] v. 干涉，干预

practicality [ˌpræktɪˈkælǝtɪ] n. 实际；实用性；实例

 

And for the last 50 years, we have shut down hundreds of illegal operations.

 

So when the Captain Paul Watson Foundation team arrives, what happens next?

 

Primarily, we focus on illegal activities. The krill fishery is actually not illegal, but we are challenging it on through the United Nations World Charter for Nature, because we believe that we have to exercise a precautionary principle here, because there's real diminishment being caused by this. And so we feel that we have to get it into court somehow.

 

World Charter for Nature 世界自然宪章

precautionary [prɪˈkɔʃǝnˌɛrɪ] adj. 預防性的

 

So what our objective was, is first to, let's bring this to the attention of the world. So how do we do that? We took our ship up against these monstrous krill fishing vessels, and we gently nudged them.

 

nudge [nʌdʒ] v.（尤指用肘部）轻推，轻触

 

And of course, they're going to accuse us of ramming them, which we didn't do, we just scraped their paint.

 

ram [ræm] v. 猛撞，撞击

scrape [skrеp] v. 刮落

 

But that nudging was in the spirit of what the Plains Indians used to call counting coup, to get their attention.

 

Plains Indians 平原印地安人

counting coup 计算功勋

coup [ku] n. 妙计；出乎意料的行动；成功之举

 

And that photograph, of course, was to dramatize the issue. And from there, we went on to interfere with their nets, and to prevent them from doing their fishing operations with the krill.

 

dramatize [ˈdræmǝˌtaɪz] v. 使戏剧化

 

And that resulted in them all fleeing the area.

 

On March 31st, one of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation's ships made headlines after deliberately colliding with a vessel operated by Aker Qrill Company, one of the world's largest Antarctic krill harvesters. Here's what Aker Qrill Company said about the incident.

 

harvester [ˈhɑrvɪstɚ] n. 收获者，收割者

 

They hit right around the diesel tank. It went well, but it could have ended differently, where you have big spillage of oil into the Antarctic Ocean. It was also very close to our rudder, you know, which allows us to control and steer the vessel.

 

spillage [ˈspɪlɪdʒ] n. 溢出

rudder [ˈrʌdɚ] n.（船的）舵

 

And just a few hours later, it grew up to a large storm. And if we didn't have the rudder to control the vessel.

 

Do you have this fear that if, if krill becomes more endangered now, that perhaps these whales wouldn't be able to adapt as they have in the past?

 

You simply can't take that amount of krill out of the Southern Ocean without having an impact.

 

And we're seeing that impact. That's the diminishment of all species of penguins down in the Southern Ocean. They all rely on krill, except for the emperor penguin.

 

But the emperor penguin relies on silverfish, which relies on krill. So everything is connected to krill.

 

The krill fish is heavily regulated. So you can only catch 1% of the biomass. So 99% of the biomass is left to all the animals that are consuming about 24% of the biomass every year.

 

biomass [ˈbaɪoˌmæs] n. 生物量（泛指某一系统中一切生物物质的总量）

 

When we harvest it, we harvest very little and make sure there's plenty enough krill left for ecosystems and everybody that relies on krill.

 

If someone watching this wants to help, but might not know how, what are some things that they can do?

 

The consumption of farm-raised salmon is the reason that this is happening. About 40% of all the fish that's taken from the ocean is converted into fish meal. It's not eaten by people.

 

And so this krill thing is, in order to replace the diminishment of the fish that they're exploiting, we're going to catch the krill and convert that into the salmon food. Basically what we have to do is eliminate salmon farming. It's an extremely destructive industry.

 

Well, for the last 50 years, I've seen the steady diminishment of biodiversity in our ocean. And I've been saying year after year, if the ocean dies, we die. And therefore, it's really our responsibility to ensure that biodiversity is not diminished.

 

All right. If you thought Earth Dayviews were good from your backyard, try this one from the moon. Would you look at that, man? The Artemis 2 crew astronaut, Reid Wiseman, captured this stunning Earth set, our planet dipping below the moon's horizon.

 

He described it as watching a sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos. And the wild part, it wasn't some giant space camera. He snapped it through a tiny window with his iPhone.

 

You can even hear his fellow astronaut, Christina Koch, snapping away too, capturing iconic images released by NASA that remind us from up there, there are no borders, no divisions, just one glowing, fragile, beautiful home.

 

Now to some Earth Day hope served extra cute. In Southern California's Big Bear Valley, a pair of internet famous bald eagles is welcoming some new additions this spring.

 

bald eagle 白头海鵰   (秃头海鵰，俗称秀鵰、秃头鵰、白头鵰或白头鹰)

 

Jackie and Shadow are now proud parents times two. They are the Valley's only year-round bald eagle residents. They've been the stars of a live stream for years.

 

Earlier this month, viewers got a front row seat to nature's reality show, watching their eaglets hatch over Easter weekend.

 

eaglet [ˈiɡlɪt] n. 小鹰

 

Now, mom and dad, they have their talons full with this puffy pair of siblings known as simply Chick One and Chick Two so far. And that's where you come in.

 

talon [ˈtælǝn] n.（尤指猛禽的）爪

puffy [ˈpʌfɪ] adj. 脹大的；肥滿的

 

The non-profit Friends of Big Bear Valley is hosting a naming contest for the chicks with proceeds going to help protect their habitat. Students at a local elementary school will peruse the list of names to pick the finalists. Last spring's hatchlings were dubbed Spirit, Sunny, and Gizmo.

 

peruse [pǝˈruz] v. 仔細觀察；仔細研究

gizmo [ˈɡɪzmo] n. 小装置; 小玩意; 小东西

 

I may be biased, but Rise Up and Sunshine have a certain ring to them, don't you think?

 

have a ring to it 听起来很有感觉; to sound appealing

 

Pop quiz hot shot. Which of these has the highest electrical conductivity of any metal? Nickel, iron, silver, or aluminum?

 

conductivity [ˌkɑndʌkˈtɪvǝtɪ] n.【电】导电率

 

If you said silver, shine bright. One common use for silver is in electric circuit boards due to its conductivity, but some parts exposed to oxygen are usually swapped for gold because it doesn't tarnish as easily.

 

circuit board 电路板

tarnish [ˈtɑrnɪʃ] v. 使…失去光泽；玷污

 

Extra pop quiz hot shot. What do your broken refrigerators, old cell phones, and mystery drawers of tangled chargers have in common?

 

They're all part of one of the most pressing pollution problems on our planet, electronic waste or e-waste. Mountains of it, from broken microwaves to busted TVs, pile up landfills each year.

 

And as our love for shiny new tech grows, so does the e-waste we leave behind. A recent UN report says that more than 62 million tons of it was generated in 2022 alone. That would fill about one and a half million dump trucks.

 

Bumper to bumper, that would circle the equator. But one company is using an innovative approach to help curb the crisis, literally dissolving the waste with special chemicals.

 

DeCycle uses deep eutectic solvents, or DES for short, to dissolve the precious metals found in so many circuit boards and other electronics.

 

eutectic [juˈtɛktɪk] adj. 共熔的; 熔点最低的

solvent [ˈsɔlvǝnt] n. 溶媒，溶剂

 

They say it allows them to recover things like gold, copper, and palladium from e-waste in a sustainable and efficient way. They say the process is also more eco-friendly than traditional e-waste recycling through processes like smelting, which consumes large amounts of energy and can release hazardous chemicals into the environment.

 

smelt [smɛlt] v. 熔煉；精煉

 

Today's story, getting a 10 out of 10,a group of high schoolers proving you're never too young to make waves or protect your coast.

 

Oysters play a huge role in marine ecosystems by providing food and protection for fish. Students from St. Patrick Catholic High School in Biloxi, Mississippi are partnering with the Coastal Conservation Association to apply what they learned to this project, attaching oyster shells to sheet metal that once belonged to an old shrimping boat. This student-made reef will then be deployed near Ship Island.

 

The finished product will be a part of a permanent reef site and expand the oyster ecosystem. Those students don't just talk about change, they build it.

 

Congrats to our Your Word Wednesday winners, Ms. Alzheimer, Jackson, and William and our friends at Chamblee Middle School in Chamblee, Georgia.

 

The word of the day, peruse, a verb meaning to read or examine something in a thorough, detailed, and careful manner. I see you, Bulldogs.

 

We have some Earth Day shout-outs today, and the first one goes to Mrs. Fast at Franklin Middle School in Yakima, Washington.

 

Thank you so much for this hand-embroidered needlepoint piece, and Mrs. Fast, right now it's a necklace, but we have a perfect spot for you and this on our wall of friends.

 

embroider [ɪmˈbrɔɪdɚ] v. 在（织物）上绣花纹

needlepoint [ˈnidḷˌpɔɪnt] n.（装饰用之）织景画

 

All right, this next shout-out goes to Mrs. Souffle, Mrs. Souffle and Ms. Gibson at Jessup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. Their students are in charge of a huge recycling initiative, and they sent us this recycled paper project and a very Earth Day appropriate shirt.

 

Thank you so much. From classroom lessons to real-world impact, this is what Earth Day is all about. Let's go out and do our part.

 

Recycle something. Pick up a piece of trash, plant some seeds, or just tell someone who's taking care of our planet, thank you. Keep rising and keep shining, sunshine.

 

I'm Coy Wire, and we are CNN 10.