[video_player id=”vJJsXOda”]Video: Antarctic islands surpass Galapagos for biodiversity
A GROUP of isolated Antarctic islands has proven unexpectedly rich in life – home to more species of sea and land animals than the Galapagos Islands. The findings raise the issue of what effect climate change – already influencing the Antarctic – will have on this rich biodiversity.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge and from the University of Hamburg in Germany carried out the first comprehensive biodiversity survey of the South Orkney Islands, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. As well as surveying the islands themselves and deploying scuba divers, they also used trawl nets to search the surrounding water to a depth of 1500 metres.
The team found over 1200 species in total, mostly living in the sea. Over a third of them had not previously been observed in the region, and five were entirely new (Journal of Biogeography, ).
These findings challenge the traditional view that biodiversity is concentrated around the tropics and declines towards polar regions, says lead researcher David Barnes of the BAS.
While global warming may not cause the region’s overall biodiversity to fall, the species living there are likely to change. “As the sea gets warmer, temperate species will move into Antarctica and Antarctic species will shift further south or into colder regions,” says Barnes. The islands are “the one place with a real possibility of detecting new things arriving and things leaving.”
“Species composition in this region is likely to change as a result of global warming”
Jon Copley, a marine ecologist at the University of Southampton, UK, agrees. “The starting point for any conservation strategy has got to be knowing what you’ve got to conserve,” he says, “and this study provides a very valuable baseline.”
A change in the composition of species would result in an overall loss in the Earth’s biodiversity. “All that it will take is for a few things to alter,” says Barnes.
