Antarctica Wildlife at Your Fingertips

In the depths of the Crary building at McMurdo Station, you can find a collection of Antarctic macrofauna living in the aquarium's touch tank. These specimens were collected by Alex Brett, the station's dive supervisor, during one of the dives our team did at the Jetty dive site.

The touch tank is open for tours to all people at the station. The purpose is to show the community a little bit of the science that they are helping to support by working here.

Crary Touch Tank contains seawater from the McMurdo Sound and some rocks for the animals to feel at home.

In the touch tank, you can encounter a variety of animals. You can see fish, sea spiders, sea stars, sea urchins, and nudibranchs. These are only a few of the animals that you can encounter in the McMurdo Sound, but there are a lot more (of different sizes and colors) that live in the salty waters under the sea ice. Our lab member Paola is actually working with a couple of the species you can find in the touch tank for her thesis project, keep an eye out for her future blogs!

Which animal is your favorite?

A fish belonging to the class Actinopterygii and a sea spider from the Pycnogonida class.

Sea stars from the class Asteroidea, sea urchin from the class Echinoidea, and some nudibranchs belonging to the class Gastropoda.

Honorable mention to this giant sea spider, which is too big to fit in the touch tank and has to be kept in a larger one. We still love you, Spidey!