Antarctic Marine Life Challenges Scientific Thought on Biodiversity

Antarctic Marine Life Challenges Scientific Thought on Biodiversity

When most people think of the South Pole, they think of bleak and bitter cold. They think of nothingness, as far as the eye can see. Perhaps they think of penguins and killer whales, but not much other life. However, they couldn't be more wrong. Between 2002 and 2005, an international team of scientists, mostly biologists, traversed to this seemingly desolate part of the world to search for marine life. Although expecting to confirm their suspicions that little life existed, instead they found a cornucopia of aquatic animals, ranging from one-celled organisms to exotic sponges and sea urchins.

In fact, they found over 600 different species that are completely new to science, never having been seen or recorded before. But, because of their primal nature, as well as their similarity to other organisms around the world, and the biologic and geographic history of the Antarctic, the scientists' findings suggest that all life on Earth originated in the Antarctic. These findings are startling to the scientific world because most scientists assumed that patterns of biodiversity in the Antarctic would be similar to those in the Arctic, which really is bleak and desolate, lacking much life.

Besides cataloging new species, the team of experts studied how surface creatures intermingled with deep-sea creatures, taking aquatic samples from anywhere between 2,000 and 21,000 feet below surface level. Because of the nature of reproduction of certain species, some species they found are localized. In other words, because some species can't disperse well, they remain only in the Antarctic, while others are found even in the northern Arctic. Interestingly, the biologists sort of saw the direct effects of evolution. The organisms that lived near the surface had eyes, because light was filtering through the water. But those organisms towards to bottom didn't have eyes, because they didn't need them since it was completely dark in the deep waters. Another interesting find involved a single cell organism called foraminifera. The team found three distinct species of foraminifera that were almost identical to those found in the North Pole, suggesting that these little critters had trekked the entire globe!

The reason that many of the species found in the Southern Ocean look so prehistoric is because they practically are. The Antarctic has been relatively stable and isolated for the past 40 million years, due to continental shifts and the formation of oceans. Because of this, many species have been able to adapt and evolve almost completely untouched by outside forces, thus retaining many of their prehistoric qualities.