Giant Sea Creatures Size of Dinner Plates Discovered
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Gigantic sea creatures and sea spiders the size of dinner plates, and jellyfish with 20 foot (6 meter) long tentacles have been discovered in the deep waters around Antarctica by Australian scientists trawling on an expedition which arrived back in Hobart this week.
Brightly colored coraline, bryozoans and sponges sit on the ocean floor at a
depth of about1970 feet (600 meters) on the Antarctic continental shelf.
Photo Xinhua / Reuters
Massive worms and enormous crustaceans have been filmed and captured during the expedition which trawled the floor of the Southern Ocean nearly a mile below the surface. Numerous animals couldn’t be identified which were sent to labs, possibly to be classed as newly discovered species.
“Some of the video footage is really stunning. Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters — we have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates.” said Martin Riddle, leader on the research ship Aurora Australis.
“Many [of the animals] live in the dark and have pretty large eyes. They are strange looking fish.”
“I was staggered by the size of things to be honest.” said Riddle. Of the sea spiders, he said: “We were getting up many of these where the leg spans were larger than a dinner plate.”
“It’s amazing to be able to navigate undersea mountains and valleys and actually see what the animals look like in their undisturbed state.” Dr. Riddle said.
“In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life. In others we can see deep scars and gouges where icebergs scour the sea floor as they pass by.”
Sponges, gorgonians and lace corals sit on the ocean floor at a depth of
about 1310 feet (400 meters) on the Antarctic continental shelf.
Photo Xinhua / Reuters
The journey was part of an international effort to record a census of sea life in the area and monitor the impact of global warming and other environmental changes on Antarctic waters.
The mission’s 3 ships on the expedition returned to Australia chock-full of sea life including unknown species of sea creatures collected near the eastern Antarctic land mass.
Martin Riddle said his 7-week expedition had collected “thousands and thousands” of animals and as many as 1,500 different species.
Some creatures acquired from between 650 to 4,600 feet (200 to 1400 meters) below the surface weighed up to 66 pounds (30 kilos), while some 25% of the sea life chronicled was previously unknown.
The Australian scientists spent 20 days at sea, 24 hours a day in 12-hour shifts filming and collecting marine specimens of fish, sea urchins and more unusual animals such as the glass-like tunicates which grow up from the sea bed.
Animals called tunicates which look like 3-foot-tall glass tulips sit on the ocean
floor at a depth of about 722 feet (220 meters) on the Antarctic continental shelf.
Photo Martin Riddle / Australian Antarctic Division / AP
Experts believe the species will help them analyze how rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels make the oceans more acidic, which scientists forecast will make it problematic for some marine organisms to grow and sustain their calcium carbonate skeletons.
Riddle said, “It is predicted that the first effects of this will be seen in the cold, deep, waters of Antarctica. What we saw down there were vast coralline gardens based on calcareous organisms and these are the ones that could really be lost in an increasingly acidic ocean.”
“We know these effects are going to be seen first in Antarctica.” he said. “We need to know about it to begin to ring the warning bells.”
This Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census study (CEAMARC), is part of ongoing research under the International Polar Year initiative. The French and Japanese ships examined the mid and upper ocean, while the Australian ship studied the ocean floor.
“This research will help scientists understand how communities have adapted to the unique Antarctic environment.” said Graham Hosie, leader of the census project on Umitaka Maru.
“Specimens collected will be sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and bar-coding of their DNA. Not all of the creatures that we found could be identified and it is very likely that some new species will be recorded as a result of these voyages.”
Some of the sea life was only filmed, as it was too fragile to remove.
CEAMARC is coordinated by the Australian Antarctic Division, which will see some 16 voyages to Antarctic waters from 2007 through to 2009.
The census will survey the biodiversity of Antarctic slopes, abyssal plains, open water, and under disintegrating ice shelves. It aims to determine species biodiversity, abundance and distribution and establish a baseline dataset from which future changes can be observed.
CNN – Giant Sea Spider Filmed
Sources: Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and Yahoo News
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Those sea spiders are awesome! So graceful! It’s crazy that after all these years of catalogging creatures, that we can still find some new ones.
They’re quite incredible, aren’t they Jason. Yes, it never ceases to amaze me how man is continually finding new forms of life even in this day and age
this website is awesome
yeah i like it it’s all pretty interesting
I went diving off Boracay in the Philippines and there is coral that looks like a big dining table. There are also some plants that hide in coral that quickly hide if you try to touch them.
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