Antarctica Under the Microscope

On top of the ice lie penguins, seals and skuas in Antarctica. Under the ice are fields of sea stars, sponges, corals and nemertean worms. But what about under the seafloor? Here is a collage I put together from this season of many of the invertebrates that burrow and crawl around the sediment.

One of the types of collections we're doing during our SCUBA dives here are infaunal sediment cores. This means cores of the seafloor to look at the animals that live inside. We take multiple cores at different depths, sites, and levels of methane release.

I spend many hours under the microscope sorting through these rocks and gravel picking out all the animals to study which animals live there and how abundant they are.

These are the three most dominant animals: an anemone called Edwardsia meridionalis, a tube-building worm called Spiophanes tcherniai, and a protist called Gromia oviformis. The collage above showcases some of the other animals including amphipods, clams, snails, shrimp, ostracods, mites, kinorynchs, and other worms.

These may be animals that most people will never see as they're mostly smaller than 1 millimeter. However, they all play an important role in how nutrients and chemicals are cycled through the ocean. This work will help us decipher how the methane seeps we are studying impact the animals communities in McMurdo Sound.