New Species Discovered Living Upside Down on Antarctic Ice Shelf

In the icy waters around Antarctica, researchers conducting an engineering test on a robotic underwater camera made a surprising discovery: tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of tiny sea anemones burrowed into the ice shelf.

What's more, the anemones were an entirely new species, and the first known to live in ice.

The discovery was made beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, the world's largest floating body of ice, by the Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program.

"The pictures blew my mind," said Marymegan Daly of The Ohio State University, who studied the specimens retrieved by ANDRILL team members in Antarctica.

Although these anemones are not the first to be found in Antarctica, they are the first known to burrow in ice and the first known to do so upside down. Typical anemones live on the sea flood, but this new species, named Edwardsiella andrillae, in honor of the ANDRILL program, hang from the ice shelf floating in the water.

The discovery of E. andrillae was unintended. The ANDRILL researchers were attempting to learn more about ocean currents beneath the ice shelf and collect environmental data while fiield testing the robotic camera. They did not expect to find organisms living beneath the ice, no less a new species.

"Just how the sea anemones create and maintain burrows in the bottom of the ice shelf, while that surface is actively melting, remains an intriguing mystery," said Scott Borg, head of the Antarctic Sciences Section in the National Science Foundation's Division of Polar Programs. "This goes to show how much more we have to learn about the Antarctic and how life there has adapted."

Frank Rack, executive director of the ANDRILL Science Management Office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called the the discovery "total serendipity."

"What started out as a engineering test of the remotely operated vehicle during its first deployment through a thick ice shelf turned into a significant and exciting biological discovery," he said. "They had found a whole new ecosystem that no one had ever seen before."

Further research of the ecosystem is being planned, and scientists hope to explore again as early as 2015.

A research paper detailing the new species is published in the journal PLOS One.