New species of marine life discovered in Antarctica

19th February,2008

The World Today
Reporter: Felicity Ogilvie

ELEANOR HALL: Giant worms, sea spiders and big eyed fish are just some of the new species scientists have found on the Antarctic seabed.

In the last couple of weeks, the marine experts have been trawling the waters off eastern Antarctica as part of a census of marine life, as Felicity Ogilvie reports.

SONG EXCERPT: A sailor went to sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see.

FELICITY OGILVIE: In the sea east of Antarctica, two kilometres below the surface, in water that's just above freezing point, a previously unknown world of creatures are thriving.

Scientists have been trawling the sea floor taking a marine census just to see what was there.

The Australian Antarctic Division's, Martin Riddle, was on the deck of the Aurora Australis when the trawling nets brought up the creatures.

MARTIN RIDDLE: We had some of the world's experts on Antarctic fish and they were completely, completely flabbergasted as to some of the fish that came on board - unable to name them.

FELICITY OGILVIE: And what did they look like, these fish that you had never seen before?

MARTIN RIDDLE: They had fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths. Many of them had very large eyes, although what they are going to use them for there where there is no light I couldn't tell you. But they are very strange looking fish.

FELICITY OGILVIE: The team used three ships to trawl for life in a 50,000 square kilometre area off east Antarctica.

Dr Graham Hosie was on a Japanese boat that discovered new species of plankton and jellies.

GRAHAM HOSIE: Well, they looked like pretty much sort of the jellies you may see in sort of coastal waters but you just have to measure them - much, much larger, some of them with enormous tentacles at six metres long or more.

Quite often, brightly coloured with a deep sort of burgundy sort of colour, which I'm not too sure why because there is not much colour down there and there is certainly no light.

FELICITY OGILVIE: France is the other collaborative country and the hundreds of different species are being taken back to the Paris Museum to be identified.

Martin Riddle says the idea of the marine census is to create a benchmark of just what's living in the Antarctic Ocean.

MARTIN RIDDLE: I went down there with certain expectations but they were so, so much exceeded. They just blew me away and I now realise how really important it is to document that before the changes that we're seeing happening, and particularly ocean acidification, before these changes really take hold.

FELICITY OGILVIE: Having just discovered these creatures, scientists are now concerned how much longer they will be there.

Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are causing ocean acidification and Dr Riddle says ocean acidification is cause by global warming and that's a real threat to some of these marine creatures.

MARTIN RIDDLE: And what we saw down there were vast coralline gardens based on calcareous organisms and these are the ones that really could be lost in an increasingly acidic ocean.

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2166899.htm