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Antarctica rich in lives, species: study

Xinhua, June 25, 2015 Adjust font size:

Antarctica is not a barren wasteland as people had imagined, instead, it has a wealth of plants and wildlife, with myriad species waiting to be discovered, the Australian National University (ANU) said in a press release on Thursday.

Quoting a new assessment published in the journal Nature this week, ANU said that genetic studies have revealed that the species, many of them tiny, are as diverse as warmer ecosystems, and many of them are found only in specific regions of the continent.

"In a recent expedition to the Weddell Sea, 674 marine species were found, 80 percent of which were new to science," said co- author, Ceridwen Fraser, from ANU's Fenner School of Environment and Society.

"Amongst the ice and rocks there are a massive number of species: in the sea, things like sea spiders, corals, worms and so on, and on land, springtails, mites, mosses and fungi. Many of these species are not found anywhere else on the planet," she said.

Fraser said that there are now over 8,000 marine species documented, and genetic studies suggest there may be two to three times as many not yet found.

The team of scientists, led by Monash University in Australia, along with colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey, University of Waikato in New Zealand and ANU, looked at how recent investigations have revealed the continent and surrounding ocean are rich in species.

They are also very highly diversified into a variety of distinct ecological regions that differ greatly from each other.

Each area of the Antarctic also has very different groupings of species, said Fraser.

"While initially they may look the same, they are actually very different," she said.

The team also noted several unusual ways in which patterns of biodiversity are produced in the region.

Geothermal heated areas, such as volcanoes, have played an important role as refuges from icy, glacial conditions on land. At sea, wind has an especially significant effect on diversity. Windier areas have more seabird species. Endi