Meet the scientists!

Krill are little shrimp like creatures that live in the Antarctic Ocean and there are loads of them! In fact they are the largest animal biomass on the planet; their total mass equals twice to that of humans. In other words if we were to divide equally all the krill among everybody alive on the planet today, everybody would get twice their weight worth of krill!! Krill are at the bottom of the food chain meaning that a lot of other animals like whales, penguins, dolphins, fish and humans (!) eat them. Unfortunately their numbers are in decline and we think that this might be due to over fishing (by humans) and global warming. Krill live in huge swarms and move up and down in the ocean every 24 hours. At night they go to the surface of the ocean to feed and during the day they go back to the ocean floor to avoid visual predators. We think that an internal circadian (meaning almost 24 hour) clock controls this behaviour.We like all other animals and plants also have a circadian clock. We all get up more or less at the same time each day, we get hungry more or less at the same time and if we travel to America for example, we are jet lagged because our circadian clock is messed up. We know very well how this clock works molecularly in mice and fruit flies (the small flies you might have seen in your composting bin-they are actually a very nice genetic model organism) .

We try to understand if the circadian clock of krill works in a similar way. The more we learn about krill biology the better we can understand why their numbers are declining and we can try to do something about it.

As you can see I am quite undecided about it, there is so much that can be done. I would probably end up splitting the money between things and try to make it go as far as possible…

I will definetely give some of the money to a campaign called “Daddy send me to School”. In Turkey there are loads of girls who  are not sent to school at all, so they can’t even read and write. Some of this money can change  the lives of many little girls!