This story starts over three years ago. My colleagues and I published an observation of four large fishing vessels among a pod of fin whales ~20 km to the northwest of the South Orkney Islands. The fishing vessels and the whales were there for the same reason, to hunt for Antarctic krill. This wasn’t just a few whales, either; it was a “supergroup” of about 1,000 individuals, possibly the largest group of baleen whales ever documented. At the time, it was unclear whether such large whale aggregations, or the direct overlap between actively feeding whales and the krill fishery, represented rare anomalies or previously undocumented but regularly occurring phenomena. 

That’s when Sea Shepherd’s Peter Hammarstedt reached out. He told me they were planning a return to the Antarctic – their first expedition there since Japan ended its whaling program in 2018 – specifically to document this krill conflict. I was happy to help from afar; I wanted answers just as badly as they did. In the years that followed, their observations painted a clear picture: neither these massive whale gatherings nor the heavy presence of krill trawlers were flukes. Both are regular features of the region. The footage brought back from those first campaigns is a sobering reminder that even the most remote oceans on Earth aren’t safe from industrial exploitation.

Following their 2024 expedition, Peter invited me to join them the next year. I was hesitant. Like many people, my image of Sea Shepherd was shaped by the Whale Wars days; I pictured an organization that I thought routinely put its crew in harm’s way for the cause. While there’s a place for direct action like this, I prefer to let the data do the talking. After a lot of discussion, I was convinced the trip would be safe, but scheduling conflicts kept me from going in 2025. Instead, I sent two trusted colleagues as a scouting party to see if a partnership made sense. Their verdict? The collision between media-heavy advocacy of Sea Shepherd and meticulous science we were attempting meant that research aims often took a backseat.

Based on our team’s feedback from the 2025 trip, we informed Sea Shepherd that for a future collaboration to work, we would need at least some “science priority” time while aboard. This was no small request. Operating a vessel in Antarctica is incredibly expensive, and we could offer no guarantee that our findings would conclusively determine the fishery’s impact on the whales. To my surprise, after conferring with the Sea Shepherd Board, Peter responded by nearly doubling the length of the 2026 expedition to almost two months, dedicating half of that time entirely to research, and inviting me to bring a small team of my choosing.

I was floored by the offer. For a marine scientist, ship time is a precious, highly competitive commodity. Chartering even a medium-sized research vessel (i.e., 50-200 ft) typically costs upwards of $5,000 per day; $20,000 per day would not be unheard of. Beyond the financial cost, it requires a specialized ship capable of operating safely for weeks in the remote Southern Ocean, days away from resupply or medical evacuation. While I remained characteristically skeptical, it was an opportunity too rare and significant to turn down. When I say rare, perhaps I should say unique – Sea Shepherd had never given this degree of control to independent scientists; and no expedition had spent this amount of time exploring the pelagic waters of the South Orkneys for research since the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration roughly a century prior.

So, in late February 2026, four team members and I flew over the notorious Drake Passage to meet the crew and the Allankay at King George Island. This ship would be our home and community for the next month. From there, we steamed for two days and approximately 300 miles east until we hit the krill fishing grounds surrounding the South Orkney Islands. What greeted us was magnificent. Massive glaciers spilled from the islands, interspersed between the towering dark peaks of Coronation Island; summits that, in all likelihood, have never experienced a human footprint.

I don't think anyone on our team, and definitely not me, was prepared for the sheer density of wildlife we encountered there. Whenever the weather cooperated (a massive 'if' in the Southern Ocean), the ocean boiled with life. Seeing pods of over 100 whales was normal. They swam alongside tens of thousands of chinstrap penguins; overhead were swirling flocks of black-browed albatrosses and other seabirds too numerous to count. This was the legendary, untouched Southern Ocean I’d read about in logs written by explorers like James Weddell and William Bruce from the 1800s and early 1900s. I constantly had to pinch myself: we were watching a broken ecosystem rebuild itself in real time.

Even though we were told that we would have priorty during our time aboard, it was not clear exactly how that would manifest. Would this seasoned crew trust us and (figuratively) hand over the reins of their ship to allow us to achieve our scientific objectives?  

Now that the trip has concluded, I can confidently say yes, moreso than any of us on the science team dreamed was possible at the outset. It was immediately clear we were all on the same team, and that our success would be their success. Every morning and evening our science team would have a meeting with the bridge crew where we discussed our goals for the day, what the weather was looking like, and where we would go based on those factors. The crew was deeply interested in the work we were doing and how they could help. It was empowering. It was humbling. But most of all, it was effective.

Without exaggeration, we collected more data on whales in the region in just this month than anyone other than the krill fishery itself has in their two plus decades there. This reality speaks not only to the importance of our voyage but also to how understudied this place is. We collected data on whale distribution and population size from the whole region of interest, an ocean area approximately the size of Switzerland. Crucially, this included vast regions where the fishery wasn’t operating. Why? Because our core goal was to measure the overlap between hungry whales and active industrial trawlers. If whales are evenly spread across the 35,000 square kilometer area, then perhaps the fishery – which only operates in a narrow sliver to the north and west of the archipelago – may not be that impactful. What we found, however, was very different.

The highest densities of whales and other krill predators, such as chinstrap penguins, were concentrated in the same narrow sliver of ocean just to the north and west of the islands that is targeted by the fishing vessels. It is logical of course, they are all hunting the same resource, but the degree of overlap we witnessed sets the stage for conflict. Our data processing is ongoing, and we hope it can shed more light on these interactions and allow us to provide actionable suggestions for how to ameliorate it.

More fundamentally what the trip showed me is that science and advocacy can not only co-exist, but thrive in each others’ presence. Scientists are trained to be objective, not emotional. In contrast, advocacy promotes a specific cause or position. But let’s be honest: scientists are human. Of course we hope our data reveals something powerful. The discipline lies in reporting the truth of the results, whatever they may be. That is objectivity.

The notion that scientists must remain emotionally disconnected from their results and real-world implications of their work is both unrealistic and outdated. We are at a critical juncture in planetary history where the Earth needs every advocate it can get. If our science can help support their advocacy to protect this fragile ecosystem, it is an opportunity to be embraced. 

I cannot speak for the entire scientific community, but for my part, I am proud to have Sea Shepherd as a partner. It is a powerful reminder that data and direct action can achieve more together than they ever could apart. It is exactly these kinds of uncommon, unexpected alliances that we sorely need if we are going to safeguard our oceans in the 21st-century and beyond. The whales of the Southern Ocean are doing their best to recover from industrial whaling; the least we can do is team up to give them a fighting chance.