Norway is harvesting krill (Euphausia superba) in the Southern Ocean and copepods (Calanus finmarchicus) in the northeast Atlantic Ocean on an unprecedented scale for use in pharmaceuticals and aquaculture foodstuffs. Government and big business are hailing this exploitation as a sustainable enterprise on the grounds that the biomass of this ‘red gold’ is enormous. Scientists have a responsibility to refute such ecological illiteracy, to inform public debate and to raise a precautionary flag.

Climate change is making ecology more complex and unpredictable than ever. It is putting krill under pressure, which in turn threatens the survival of the great whales and other predators (V. J. D. Tulloch et al. Glob. Change Biol. 25, 1263–1281; 2019). The extent to which ecosystems are imperilled by such large-scale plundering and its bycatch of fish larvae is unknown. Many questions are unanswered; still more remain unasked.

Norway could learn from the collapse of the world’s prodigious herring fisheries just 80 years after Thomas Huxley’s pronouncement that people could fish them “how they like, as they like, and when they like” (Nature 23, 607–613; 1881).