Two Species of Bone-Eating Worms Found in Antarctica

Researchers have now discovered two new species of bone-devouring worms, thriving on whale skeletons and shipwrecks around Antarctica.

The worms- Osedax antarcticus and Osedax deceptionensis were found by researchers at London's Natural History Museum and their colleagues. The worms are few millimeters long with a central trunk that has four finger-like projections, AFP reported.

Recently, another team of researchers had found nine species of organisms, including bone-eating worms, which are also called zombie worms, in a whale carcass in Antarctica.

The zombie worms have no eyes, legs, mouth or stomach. They use their roots to invade the bones of dead whales breaking down fats inside the bones with the help of certain bacteria. These bizarre worms are placed in a genus called Osedax, which in Latin means "bone devourer."

Earlier, BBC had reported the discovery of these worms in a three-million-year-old fossil in Italy.

Researchers who conducted the present study said that they were surprised that the shipwrecks didn't have any wood-eating mollusks like Xylophagainae. These wood eaters are commonly found on the ocean floor around shipwrecks.

"Over the course of a year, we deployed and recovered a piece of underwater equipment called a deep-sea lander, laden with the most unusual cargo-large whale bones and planks of wood," Adrian Glover of London's Natural History Museum, co author of the study, told AFP."When we recovered the bones and wood we'd put on the sea floor, the results were obvious immediately: the bones were infested by a carpet of red-plumed Osedax worms... but the wood planks were untouched, with not a trace of the wood-eating worms.

The deep-sea lander along with whale bones was deployed in 2007 at two sites in the Bransfield Strait. Another lander was deposited in Whalers Bay, near Deception Island, off the west Antarctic Peninsula, reported sciencemag.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.