New Species of Sea Anemone Discovered in Antarctica

Published 12 years agoon January 27, 2014

A robot surveying the underside of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf has made a startling discovery: Clinging upside-down from crannies in the ice shelf with their tentacles dangling into the icy water were thousands and thousands of tiny sea anemones.

The creatures are a new species dubbed Edwardsiella andrillae. Other anemones have been found in Antarctica, but these are the first reported to live in the ice. The tiny, white invertebrates reside in burrows in the ice and extend their tentacles to filter-feed from the water below.

The finding, detailed in the December 2013 issue of the journal PLOS ONE, was a complete surprise.

“When the robot got down, the engineers noticed the ice looked kind of fuzzy, and when it drifted up to take a look they saw anemones, and knew it was really something special,” said Frank Rack, science leader of the Antarctic Geological Drilling Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Other groups have drilled through Antarctic ice shelves before, he said, “but nobody looked up.”

The team’s actual mission was to survey ocean currents near the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of ice extending more than 600 miles (970 kilometers) northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea, to model the behavior of a drill string, a length of pipe extending to the seafloor which delivers drilling fluids and retrieves sediment samples. The work is part of a larger effort to study what Antarctica was like before its glaciers formed.

Rack and his team drilled a hole through the 890-foot-thick (270 meters) ice shelf and lowered down a robotic vehicle known as the SCINI ROV (Submersible Capable of under-Ice Navigation and Imaging – Remotely Operated Vehicle) on a tether. The robot contained two cameras: one that looked forward and one that normally faced down.

Swimming upside down, the robot trained its cameras on the anemones, which seemed to be glowing. The anemones probably feed on detritus and the upwelling of nutrient-rich water. The ice under the front of the shelf is melting at a rate of about 3.3 feet (1 meter) per year, so the creatures must be burrowing to stay inside the ice, Rack said. Scientists don’t really know how far the creatures extend, but it could be hundreds of miles.