Citizen Power

Marine Life Census Finds 235 Common Species at Poles

This is  amazing.   Many people think that no life can exist in very cold water at the poles, but life has a way of surviving even the most extreme conditions.   At least 235 marine species live both in the Arctic and Antarctica, way more than previously thought, according to research by the Census of Marine Life. Although almost 7,000  miles separate the polar seas, the researchers discovered the same species of cold-water worms, crustaceans, sea cucumbers, and snail-like creatures, called pteropods, among others. Scientists suspect that during ice ages, the common species were carried from one pole to the other — most likely from Antarctica to the Arctic — by frigid currents that drop to the bottom of the sea floor and slowly move north. The Census of Marine Life is a decade-long project to catalog the world’s marine species.

You can see some of their photos here. (pictured above: The nemertean, Pelagonemertes rollestoni, which is about three centimeters long, uses a dart attached to its tongue to harpoon its prey. Its yellow stomach reaches out to feed all other parts of the body.)

I hope what this accomplishes in part is to keep the oil and gas developers from swooping in to the areas at the poles and destroying some of this fascinating life as they search for yet more finite oil and gas.   According to the report, it says,

“The polar seas, far from being biological deserts, teem with an amazing quantity and
variety of life,” says Dr. Ian Poiner, Chair of the Census Scientific Steering Committee.
“Only through the co-operation of 500 people from more than 25 countries could the
daunting environmental challenges be overcome to produce research of such
unprecedented scale and importance. And humanity is only starting to understand the
nature of these regions.”

The polar Census teams are documenting:
• The distribution of ocean animals – mapping their changing ranges and hotspots;
• The diversity of species (to date: 7,500 animals in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the
Arctic, of a global marine life species total estimated at 230,000-250,000); and
• The abundance and sizes of major species groups at various levels in the food
web, in order to gauge how they change over time;

These places include seafloors exposed to light for the first time in as long as 100,000 years,  when  ancient ice shelf lids melted and disintegrated in recent years.