Antarctic sponges discovered under the sea ice

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Researchers were drilling 900 meters of ice into the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, located southeast of the Weddell Sea, when they encountered unexpected creatures “firmly attached to a rock” living in the dark. and subzero temperatures.

A collection of stationary animals – sponges and potentially several previously unknown species – were among the finds.

Animals like these are not expected to live in these extreme places, as they are so far away from sunlight and any obvious food source.

It was “a real surprise to see these animals over there,” said marine biologist Huw Griffiths, lead author of a new study documenting the Discovery. “It’s about 100 miles farther under the ice floe than we’ve ever seen a sponge before.”

The accidental discovery was made by a team of geologists, who were drilling through the ice to collect mud samples, but stumbled upon the rock sheltering these strange creatures.

The area beneath giant floating ice shelves is one of the least known habitats on the planet.

To get a glimpse of what’s going on under a huge mass of ice, boreholes are drilled and cameras lowered. The total area humans have seen under the ice shelves is roughly the size of a tennis court, according to Griffiths, who has worked with the British Antarctic Survey for more than 20 years.

Finding the sponges in this remote location, Griffiths said, was what made this find particularly puzzling.

Researchers are drilling boreholes and lowering cameras to observe what is happening under the massive mass of ice.

If there were a lot of sunlight and an abundance of food, filter feeders like these typically dominate, Griffiths said. In deep seas with a limited food supply, you are more likely to find crabs and mobile animals looking for food, he added.

“Either way, some really specialized members of the filtering community can survive,” he said. “They could be new species or they could just be an incredibly hardy version of what normally lives in Antarctica – we just don’t know. I guess this is potentially a new species. ”

Griffiths explained, “If they live in a place as difficult as this, they are probably specially adapted to be there. Chances are they will go weeks, months, and years without food – you have to be tough enough to cope. ”

The stationary animals inhabiting the surface of the rock have been discovered by scientists.

This could be an opportunity to learn from these “hardy” organisms and how they survive in extreme conditions – whether for medical, technical or other scientific purposes, he said.

Smarter technology and ideas are needed to get close to these animals, he said, and more research is needed to really get a better and bigger picture of what’s going on under the ice.

“It’s this idea that there’s a whole world that we don’t know anything about. The idea that there are a lot more of these rocks out there. … It would be a huge habitat that we didn’t know about. existence, ”Griffiths said.

“There are so many questions. There is life on Earth that does not follow the rules that biologists understand.”

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