In a Dhaka pet shop, a shrimp-like crustacean from the bottom of the world sits on the ingredient list, and almost nothing along the supply chain requires anyone to explain what it is.
On a side street at the edge of Dhaka’s Ward 49, Akhtar runs a small pet supply shop. He stocks imported tins and foil packets, takes orders through a Facebook page, and sells to customers he knows by name. He cannot always tell a genuine imported brand from a convincing counterfeit. “I just believe in where I buy from,” he says. He has never read the full ingredient list on the packets stacked behind him, and when asked what “krill meal” means, he says he does not know. No inspector, he says, has ever come by his shop to check.
That last detail is worth pausing on, because it is Akhtar’s account of his own experience, not a fact anyone has independently verified about Bangladesh’s pet food trade as a whole. It is, however, a reasonable place to start, because it captures something real: an ordinary shopkeeper standing at the very end of a supply chain that, several links back, reaches into some of the most closely watched waters on Earth.
Bangladeshi households extend that kind of care to animals often and visibly: rice set aside for a street dog, a family cat fed before the family eats. It is a small, ordinary devotion, and it is also, without anyone intending it, the start of a supply chain that ends in one of the most tightly managed fisheries on the planet.
Among the brands sold in shops like his and through Dhaka’s pet-owner Facebook groups is BonaCibo, a Turkish cat and dog food line manufactured by the Çağatay family’s Çangal Tarım operation in İzmir and officially distributed in Bangladesh by 3S Impex, based in Tejgaon. The ingredient panel for BonaCibo’s Adult Cat Chicken, Anchovy and Rice formula lists, after dehydrated chicken protein, rice and anchovy meal, a line that reads simply: “Krill Meal.” Nothing on the packet or the company’s own product pages specifies which krill, or where it was caught.
That gap is not an oversight so much as an industry norm, and it turns out to matter. “Krill” is not one thing. There is Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, harvested almost exclusively from the Southern Ocean under an international fisheries treaty. There is also Pacific krill and several smaller species fished elsewhere, sold into similar markets. A label that says “krill meal” without qualification does not, by itself, prove a connection to Antarctica. It is simply a word that invites a question nobody in the supply chain from İzmir to Dhaka appears obliged to answer.
What krill actually is
Antarctic krill is a finger length crustacean similar like shrimp, and it is almost certainly the most abundant wild animal species on the planet by weight, with a total biomass scientists have estimated at somewhere around 379 million tonnes. It swarms in the trillions across the Southern Ocean to do two jobs at once. One is to graze on phytoplankton near the surface, and second one is, in turn, eaten by nearly everything above it: baleen whales, penguins, seals, and much of the region’s fish and seabird life. Marine biologists have described it for decades as a keystone species of the Southern Ocean, meaning the wider food web depends on it disproportionately relative to its size.
Krill do something else too, almost as an afterthought to their day job of being eaten. They graze on the surface, then sink, and the waste they leave behind carries carbon down to depths where it can sit for centuries. Researchers at Imperial College London and elsewhere put the figure at roughly 20 million tonnes of carbon a year, in the same range as what the world’s mangrove forests are credited with locking away. Conservationists lean on this point more than you might expect: krill’s value, they argue, was never just about who eats them.
How much a blue whale actually eats turned out to be one of those numbers science had simply got wrong. A 2021 study in Nature, built on tag data from 321 whales across three oceans, put the figure at around 16 tonnes of krill in a single day during feeding season, close to three times what earlier estimates assumed. It is the kind of correction that quietly changes how much krill scientists think the ocean’s largest animals need just to get through a season.
How the fishery works, and who defends it
The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is the 27-nation body that sets the rules, and it caps the main fishing zone around the Antarctic Peninsula at four million tonnes a year. Nobody has come close to that. Catches have run between 400,000 and 620,000 tonnes in recent seasons, most of it turned into krill meal and krill oil at sea, bound for aquaculture feed, supplements and pet food.
Aker BioMarine, the Norwegian company that dominates the industry, holds Marine Stewardship Council certification and puts its own catch, along with the industry’s total, at about one percent of the krill biomass in its fishing area, well inside the ten percent ceiling other fisheries treat as a safe limit. The company points to observers on every vessel, real-time reporting, and a harvesting method it says cuts down bycatch. “The Antarctic krill fishery operates under one of the world’s most precautionary and science-based management regimes,” chief executive Matts Johansen said in 2025, noting the company has closed some fishing grounds voluntarily and supports a proposed marine protected area on the Peninsula.
Almost nobody arguing about krill disputes that one percent figure. What they argue about is location. Until 2024, a rule called Conservation Measure 51-07 forced vessels to spread their catch across four sub-areas of the Peninsula, so fishing could not pile up in the same coastal waters whales, seals and penguins depend on. Member states let the rule lapse in October 2024 and have failed to bring it back since, largely because Russia and China have blocked it in a body that runs on consensus. Boats now go wherever the swarms are densest, which in practice has meant the Bransfield and Gerlache Straits, the very waters tourist boats, feeding whales and penguin colonies also rely on.
The 2024–25 season closed early for the first time in the fishery’s history, its entire 620,000-tonne quota caught so fast, in such a small area, that there was nothing left to take, according to the World Wildlife Fund. A study published in Global Change Biology in 2023 found that humpback whale pregnancy rates tracked krill availability over an eight-year period in the Western Antarctic Peninsula: 86 percent of sampled females were pregnant after a krill-abundant year, against 29 percent after a lean one. The finding predates the 2024 rule lapse, but WWF has since pointed to it as evidence that where the catch is concentrated, not how large it is, poses the more urgent risk to whale recovery. Separately, in April 2026, the IUCN added the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal to its endangered list, citing climate-driven krill declines as one factor among several, without pinning that decline on fishing specifically.
The overlap between science and industry is genuine and unresolved. CCAMLR’s own scientific committee still sets catch limits in the main fishing area using a single circumpolar krill biomass survey conducted in 2000, a quarter of a century ago, with no mechanism to account for how climate change is shifting where krill live and reproduce. A 2025 study in PNAS, led by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, found that after CCAMLR failed to renew spatial catch limits, krill catches in the Antarctic Peninsula region more than doubled within a year, from 155,000 to 355,000 tonnes, concentrating in exactly the ecologically sensitive waters the paper’s authors flagged as highest-risk. The unresolved scientific question is not whether the industry is taking too much krill in total. It is whether taking a small share from the wrong place, at the wrong time, does disproportionate damage regardless of the overall number.
That unresolved dispute has already reached European retail shelves. In April 2026, the European Parliament voted to urge the European Commission to support a five-year moratorium on Southern Ocean krill fishing. Ahead of and following that vote, several major European retailers, including Holland & Barrett in the UK and the drugstore chains dm and Rossmann in Germany, announced they would stop selling krill oil supplements, citing Sea Shepherd’s Antarctic Krill Pledge campaign. WWF, separately, formally objected to Aker BioMarine’s Marine Stewardship Council recertification this year and calling for a moratorium.
A growing market in South Asia
None of this scrutiny has meaningfully slowed the ingredient’s spread into new consumer markets, including South Asia’s fast-growing pet food sector. In 2024, the Hyderabad-based seafood and aquaculture company Growel Group launched Carniwel, a premium Indian pet food brand whose marketing explicitly names “Antarctic Krill” as one of several “superfood” ingredients, alongside algal oil and spirulina, credited with supporting cognitive development and coat health. The brand, formulated in the United States and manufactured in India, is sold in more than 4,000 stores across the country and, according to the company, exported to twenty markets. Carniwel’s promotional material does not mention where the krill is sourced or what its harvest involves.
BonaCibo, the Turkish brand on sale in Dhaka, takes a different approach: its labels say only “Krill Meal,” with no reference to Antarctica at all. Whether that ingredient traces back to CCAMLR-regulated Southern Ocean krill, as most commercially traded krill meal globally does, or to a different species and fishery, is not something the packaging, the company’s product pages, or its Bangladesh distributor make possible to verify from the outside. That is the more accurate and more common version of this story: not a confirmed straight line from a specific Dhaka packet to a specific Antarctic trawler, but a widely used ingredient, sourced from an industry overwhelmingly built around Antarctic krill, sold into a market where almost nothing on the label allows a buyer to check.
Bangladesh’s regulatory gap
Bangladesh is not, on paper, without rules for animal feed. The Fish Feed and Animal Feed Act of 2010 and the Animal Feed Rules of 2013, administered jointly by the Department of Livestock Services and the Department of Fisheries under the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, require producers, importers and marketers of feed to hold a licence and meet basic nutritional and contaminant standards. Separately, Bangladesh’s Packaged Food Labelling Regulations of 2017, enforced by the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority, require Bengali-language labelling for imported packaged food, though industry guidance suggests this requirement is inconsistently applied and, in practice, many imported products reach shelves with only their original foreign-language labels.
What none of this framework appears to include, based on the regulations as written, is any specific requirement to disclose the species or geographic origin of a marine ingredient like krill, or any system for tracking whether “krill meal” on a Bangladeshi pet food label refers to Antarctic krill, another species, or an unverifiable substitute. The Bangladesh Food Safety Authority’s core mandate, under the 2013 Safe Food Act, is built around human food; pet food falls instead under the older, narrower feed-licensing regime, a split that leaves unclear which agency, if either, would be positioned to answer a question about a companion-animal product’s marine-ingredient sourcing.
For an owner trying to navigate that gap, the tools available are limited. Rahman, 29, who lives a few streets from Akhtar’s shop and has kept a cat for three years, feeds her a mix of homemade food and packets ordered through Facebook groups. “If a cheaper option was available but I wasn’t sure it was safe, I wouldn’t buy it,” he says. He checks seller ratings and reviews before anything else. He says he has never noticed the words “krill” or “omega-3” on a packet, and when asked what they meant, he did not know. Some Dhaka pet owners, in posts shared within local Facebook groups, have described suspected cases of illness they attribute to counterfeit or adulterated feed; these accounts are widely circulated within those communities but have not been independently verified through veterinary records or laboratory testing, and should be read as anecdote rather than documented fact.
Back at the shop
None of this makes Akhtar responsible for what happens in the Southern Ocean, any more than a single shopper in Dhaka is responsible for a fishery regulated by twenty-seven governments twelve thousand kilometres away. He is one node in a chain that runs from a swarm of crustaceans off the Antarctic Peninsula, through a processing vessel, a Norwegian or Turkish manufacturer, a Dhaka importer, and finally onto a shelf where a customer who trusts his judgment picks up a bag for a cat waiting at home.
What connects him to that fishery is not a moral failing. It is a single line of text that almost nobody along the way is required to explain. Akhtar still cannot tell you what krill is. But the next time he restocks his shelves, the word is right there on the back of the bag, waiting for someone, anyone, in the chain between Dhaka and Antarctica, to ask what it actually means.
None of it asks Bangladeshi cat owners to love their animals any less. It asks only that the industry supplying them, and the regulators meant to watch over it, say plainly what is actually inside the bag.
About the Author
Nafew Sajed Joy is a Bangladeshi freelance journalist and researcher whose work spans climate, environment, and South Asian affairs.