Desarrollo de la Antártica

Phillip Law I POSSlBlLITIES FOR EXPLOITATION OF ANTARCTIC RESOURCES che sea is far from uniform, in sorne places the water being relatively clear and in other places almast as thick as sou.p because of them. The euphausids and prawns, WJhich form IJhe diet¡ of penguins, baleen whales and sorne seals, exist in swarms which are followed by che ~hales, which in turn 3.re sought by me whaling factory ships. ,In a world faced with a deficiency of protein, such vast quantities of sea-foods cannot be ignored much longer. 500n, instead of chasing whales we shall have to step down one rung on the biological ladder and harvest the food of the whales. Zooplankton, mainly in the form of these small shrimps, gatheredby powerful pumps and separated from the water by sieves or centrifuga1 me· thods, could then be cooked or frozen and compressed into blocks for use as stock fO'od or even as human food, or pulverised for use as fertiliser. Eut before suoh a scheme is possible we must know more about the habits of plan'kton and ohe factors v.'ihich determine the locations and movements of the swarms. Important research in tihis subject is being undertaken here in Chile. There might be sorne difficulties, aIso, due tO' the need to avoid small quantities of poisonous .planktonic material, notably sorne of the vegetable plank– ton. The possihilities involved can be gauged if one remembers that in farming the sea one is farming in cubic and not in square measure and "he productivity can be enormous. The logistic diffi– culties are concerned mainly with designing high speed pumps and filters or centrifuges capable of trapping tlhe plankton and separating them from the large quantities of water which would have to be handled and in dhasing the plan:k.ton swarms from place to place much as che wihale factory ships search for t;he best whaling areas. A lot of progress in this direction has been already made by t<he Japanese and Russians. 1 do not think there would be much difficulty in marketing the meat meal as stock food or in selliIlJg the fertilizier, or even in popularísing shrimp pastes for \human consumption at the cheap price leveIs w.hich should be possible. A word migiht be said here of the mammalían resO'urces, ehe 1;V,hales and seals. Whaling is a dying industry as a result of over– fishing the resources. Antarctic sealing, on the other ha'lld, has ne:ver been attempted, if one excludes the sub-Antarctic species such as elephant seals and fur seals. The seal population in Antarctica itself is mainly comprised of Weddell ..nd Crabeater seals. The population is extremely large, but because we go down there in our ~hips in the summer we never see large concentrations of these creatures. 33