Antarctic Krill

The other day my English teacher on our Bob Jones Tapes told me to write a paragraph using the skills she has taught us so far this year. She said we could write on whatever we wanted, so I looked up Antarctica on Wikipedia and clicked a link to some of the animals that live there, and the most intriguing was the Antarctic Krill. I took a page and a half of notes and crammed it all into one paragraph. :)

The Antarctic Krill is one of the most fascinating creatures on planet earth. Living in swarms that can reach densities of ten-thousand to thirty-thousand krill per cubic meter in the Arctic Ocean, this relative of the shrimp survives on mainly phytoplankton, copepods, amphipods, and zooplankton. If they reach their maximum growth, they may get up to 2.4 inches long, and weigh up to 0.07 ounces; they can even live up to six years! Antarctic Krill are often referred to as 'light shrimp' because they periodically emit a yellow-green light for 2-3 seconds from their bioluminescent internal organs. They use 12 broom like legs attached to their thorax to sweep algae off the bottom of pack ice in a zig-zag pattern into their 1 μ mouth. Flipping their tail to swim backwards at speeds up to 60 cm. per second is their effective strategy for evading their predators. 334,102,635,200 to 690,046,873,800 pounds of krill are consumed by animals each year, and they are also eaten by people in Japan and Poland. When an Antarctic Krill molts, it can shrink its body if there is not enough food nearby, and this results in the creature using less energy and requiring less food. What is so shocking about this process is not the fact that krill can shrink, but is that every part of the body shrinks except for the eyes, and the outcome is a creature with one of the most advanced vision structure on the planet. Certainly, a creature as small as an Antarctic Krill has so many amazing features and designs that it can easily be called an extraordinary animal.