While everybody else was thinking big, we were thinking small
Our idea, based on a 3 mm long zooplankton, started 20 years ago and we have been nurturing it ever since. Today, feeding people and animals with sustainable, healthy, high-quality nutrition has, we admit it, grown into a bit of a big thought, and it’s still growing.
About the source
- The tiny crustacean Calanus finmarchicus is an amazing creature.
- Its nearly at the bottom of the food web, linking the phytoplankton and higher trophic levels.
- Its small in size, but enormous in numbers.
- Short lived and renews rapidly.
Every spring and summer it appears in swarms in the surface waters and grazes heavily on the blooming phytoplankton.
When the autumn comes, it sinks near the bottom of the ocean and goes into a hibernating state.
To be able to do this, it has the most unique way of storing it energy – by converting its food to very compact lipids.
The Norwegian government has identified the Calanus finmarchicus as a resource with significant potential to contribute to the national economy, the management plan for utilizing this resource was set on a yearly quota of 254 000 tonnes.
To put some perspective to the numbers and the size of the circles, the total sum of the global fisheries and aquaculture is approx. half of the yearly biomass of calanus.
Harvesting of resources at lower trophic levels can therefore be a sustainable way of increasing the marine supply of nutrients.
Raw nutrients from the tiny zooplankton species Calanus finmarchicus.
In the Norwegian Sea, copepods belonging to the family Calanus is the largest renewable and harvestable marine resource.
