IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB132455694

Antarctic Krill and the Temporalities of Oceanic Abundance, 1930s–1960s (2022)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 113
Issue: 2
Pages: 245-265
Publication date: 2022
Language: English

DOI: 10.1086/719745

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719745

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Population ecology Temporality Scarcity Marine ecology Whales Oceans and seas 20th century Antarctica Mackintosh, Neil Alison

In the decades after World War II, oceans were envisioned as sites of resource abundance that would underpin global development. This essay investigates Antarctic krill and its potential “surplus” as one articulation of this abundance, attending to the cultural and epistemic strategies at play in constituting this ocean abundance. Concentrating on the work of Neil Mackintosh, a world-leading British whale biologist working within governmental scientific bodies, this essay identifies temporal imaginings and sensibilities as being central to his claims around krill abundance and its seeming surplus in the context of whale stocks significantly diminished through overexploitation. Mackintosh’s temporalities of abundance were generated in three overlapping and mutually reinforcing sites: the archive of the colonial scientific survey he worked for, the decades of his career, and the recovery of polar seal populations. The story of the krill surplus and the temporalities underpinning it allows for a more complex reckoning with ideas of scarcity and abundance as well as further demonstrating the need to see the temporalities at work in constituting environments and the scientific labor in them.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB132455694

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Jones, Ryan Tucker; (2013)
Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212531/)

Article Basberg, Bjørn L.; (2013)
A Crisis That Never Came: The Decline of the Antarctic Whaling Industry in the 1950s and 1960s (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421497/)

Article Merrill Baker-Médard; (2022)
Of Whales and Dugongs: Examining the Rise of Colonial Conservation as Development in Madagascar's Marine History (/p/isis/citation/CBB958956859/)

Article Jean-Baptiste Grodwohl; Franco Porto; Charbel N. El-Hani; (2018)
The Instability of Field Experiments: Building an Experimental Research Tradition on the Rocky Seashores (1950–1985) (/p/isis/citation/CBB791051684/)

Article R. L. France; (2018)
Illustration of an 1857 “Sea-Serpent” Sighting Re-Interpreted as an Early Depiction of Cetacean Entanglement in Maritime Debris (/p/isis/citation/CBB817395622/)

Book Jakobina K. Arch; Paul S. Sutter; (2018)
Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (/p/isis/citation/CBB119390015/)

Book Felix Lüttger; (2020)
Auf den Spuren des Wals – Geographien des Lebens im 19. Jahrhundert (/p/isis/citation/CBB526110817/)

Article Hannah Dickinson; Elizabeth Johnson; (2022)
Digesting Planetary Harms: Ocean Life, Biomaterial Innovation, and Uncanny Ingestions of the Anthropocene (/p/isis/citation/CBB917517949/)

Article Taylor, Joseph E., III; (2013)
Knowing the Black Box: Methodological Challenges in Marine Environmental History (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211795/)

Book Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez; Bo Poulsen; (2016)
Perspectives on Oceans Past (/p/isis/citation/CBB407635627/)

Book Frances Steel; (2018)
New Zealand And the Sea: Historical Perspectives: 2018 (/p/isis/citation/CBB227126682/)

Book Brayton, Daniel; (2012)
Shakespeare's Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201603/)

Article Thomas Miller Klubock; (2021)
The Early History of Water Wars in Chile: Rivers, Ecological Disaster and Multinational Mining Companies (/p/isis/citation/CBB123904559/)

Article G. N. H. Waller; (2017)
An Annotated Checklist of Mesoplodont Whale Species (Cetacea, Ziphiidae) Discovered After the Nineteenth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB317717329/)

Book Dorsey, Kurkpatrick; (2013)
Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (/p/isis/citation/CBB001451482/)

Article Rossi, Michael; (2010)
Fabricating Authenticity: Modeling a Whale at the American Museum of Natural History, 1906--1974 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000954445/)

Chapter Bocking, Stephen; (2013)
Situated yet Mobile: Examining the Environmental History of Arctic Ecological Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420347/)

Article Tousignant, Noemi; (October 2013)
Broken tempos: Of means and memory in a Senegalese university laboratory (/p/isis/citation/CBB036851501/)

Article Morrison, Margaret; (2002)
Modelling Populations: Pearson and Fisher on Mendelism and Biometry (/p/isis/citation/CBB000200160/)

Thesis Aaron Van Neste; (2023)
Prophets of Plenty: How Scientists Ignored Natural Complexity and Overpromised Sustainable Fisheries, 1863-Present (/p/isis/citation/CBB693602665/)