14 DAY TRIAL // Marine biologists with the Census of Marine Life (CML) initiative announce that expeditions carried out in Antarctica in order to assess the level of biodiversity there have stumbled upon an unexpected number of new species.
For most people, the South Pole is barren and icy desert, on which only a handful of species can survive. Penguins are the best example of this, but researchers say that these flightless birds are only a very small tip on a very large iceberg.
CML scientists have found around 16,000 new species of creatures living in the waters off Antarctica, a level of biodiversity that no one expected to find in such ruthless conditions.
The Census was a 10-year research initiative to analyze the world's oceans, and it ended only a few days ago. Preliminary results are now being published, but the full conclusions are still years away.
Hundreds of scientists from dozens of countries participated in the $650 million study, which saw expeditions being carried out all around the world. Experts say 19 such voyages were carried out on or around the South Pole.
More than 2,000 locations in the area were sampled for life forms, and the results are mesmerizing. Some interesting species were only found because of the high number of expeditions in the region.
“Eighty percent of the species in Antarctica live on the seafloor – creepy, crawly, slimy, leggy things,” explained British Antarctic Survey (BAS) marine biologist Huw Griffiths.
He participated this week at a conference in London, where the formal conclusion and results of the CML were made public, Our Amazing Planet reports.
“There are very few people in the world who can be expert enough to identify a new species just by looking at it. So we can send off a piece of leg to a lab in Canada, and they can tell us if it's new,” he said.
A large number of the new species were only discovered after genetic testing of their DNA. This revealed variations within known species that at times deserved new classifications.
“When we started on the Antarctic DNA barcoding campaign, we had 450 animals that had been done. Now that's up to 20,000 animals, from all over Antarctica. It's an amazing jump,” Griffiths added.
One interesting conclusion of the Antarctic portion of the CML was that most of the newly-found creatures only live here, and cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
“At least half the Antarctic species aren't found anywhere else. If you kill off an Antarctic species, the likelihood is you've killed off a species for the whole world,” the BAS expert concludes.