According to rather breathless coverage in the UK media, a new survey has shown that the Antarctic is “more diverse than the Galapagos”.
This stems from a paper published in the Journal of Biogeography which reports the first estimate of animal biodiversity at a polar locality, in this case the South Orkney Islands.
“This is the first time anybody has done an inventory like this in the polar regions,” says study author David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey (press release).
Barnes adds, via the Guardian, “There has been a long-held belief that the tropics are rich and the polar regions are poor and mid-latitudes are somewhere in between. This is the first time we’ve been able to actually look at the fauna of a polar archipelago – it is not actually that poor at all.”
Using their own surveys and previous reports, the team say there are 1,224 species living on or near the islands, including 100 terrestrial animals, 40 birds, 45 inter-tidal beasties, 64 freshwater dwellers and 60 parasitic nasties.
Alert, and not so alert, readers will notice that doesn’t add up to 1,224. And there lies the rub: while newspapers are busy illustrating this research with pictures of penguins, albatross and seals, a huge number of these species are the perhaps less photogenic benthic marine critters. And with them lies the interesting science here.
“That > 83% of marine species were benthic is also not surprising in retrospect, because most animal taxa live in or on a substratum,” write the authors. “However, not a single polar ecologist the authors asked a priori was even confident enough to guess roughly what value this might be for the [South Orkney Islands] or any polar locality.”
While the South Orkney Islands may not be swarming in easy to spot, tourist-friendly wildlife, on the bright side there are some very cool benthic beasties down there. See February’s post ‘Monster’ giant beasts found in Antarctic waters or November’s Marine census discovers more than 200 new species.
Image: diver with giant sponge / British Antarctic Survey