Many New Species Found Under Antarctica

gt_mattex writes to tell us The Globe and Mail is reporting that quite a few new species have been found in the ocean beneath the Antarctic ice. From the article: "It is too early to say exactly how many new species were discovered in the Antarctic, many in the Weddell Sea, where ice crushed the ship of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1915. The scientists saw more strange creatures than familiar ones, says Ron O'Dor, an expert in octopuses and squid from Halifax's Dalhousie University and the chief scientist in charge of producing the first marine life census of the planet by 2010."

Let me get in my boat before you start research...

Is this the initial stage of the Second Impact?

Re:Let me get in my boat before you start research

I'm not sure enough people get the NGE allusion

Re:

And for those who don't even get the "NGE" reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangeli on_glossary#Second_Impact [wikipedia.org].

(And yes, I had to look it up myself.)

Amazing

It's been millenia and we still don't know all the life on our planet. I always look forward to articles like this, they really tell us how little we do know.

Re:Amazing

i've been thinking about that too, especially about the life that resides at the bottom of our oceans....
how interesting (and suicidal, but bear with me) would it be to somehow drain all the oceans of water just to see what's left over...

i'm with you

take the common wood louse [google.com], that you can find under any rock in any forest

now, blow it up a thousand fold in size

there you go [google.com], running around the ocean floor

amazing indeed

Re:i'm with you

I knew I'd see some of these. For any slashdotters who want to see a FASCINATING and beautifully produced BBC documentary on this, I recommend episode 2 "The Deep" from their award-winning "The Blue Planet" series. Here's a direct .torrent link.

BBC The Blue Planet: The Deep .torrent [mininova.org]

Re:Amazing

Drain the oceans?!? That's ridiculous -- where would they go??? I guess you could find something that sucks really hard, like Digg, put a straw in it, and plop it on the beach.

But it would make much more sense to rapidly evaporate all of them, perhaps with a large scale hairdryer task force and/or a few strategically placed nukes.

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It's been millenia and we still don't know all the life on our planet. I always look forward to articles like this, they really tell us how little we do know.

I just finished a Microbiology intro course where the instructor kept stressing that. You thin

Anyone else worried after reading this?

"A school of fish the size of Manhattan off the New Jersey coast. About 20 million herring were travelling together."

That soon we'll find ways to make ocean life go extinct in those parts which so far relativly are protected from our interferance.. With our normal area's of fishing drying up quickly, how long will it take before we go and do our thing there too ... *sigh*

Re:Anyone else worried after reading this?

Don't you worry! We will have those scary new species gone in no time!

that's a bizarre reaction

that little nugget of news was reason to find cheer, i think

a colossal school of herring? off new jersey? isn't that good news?

why the despondent reaction to that news item? there are certainly tons of news items to find depressing reactions to about ocean life and man's hungry stomach... but that particular nugget of news is reason to cheer, don't you think?

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It's like finding a pocket of air in a sinking ship. The good news is far overshadowed by the bad news.

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It isn't such great news if the herring are filling an ecological niche left vacant by the destruction of another species, or are present in large numbers because their natural predators have been wiped out.

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You, for one, must have meant sashimi [wikipedia.org].

Great...

Here comes the Second Impact. Glad I'm a couple hundred miles inland and not living in Japan...

ANCIENTS

IT's the ANCIENT outpost

shouldn't it be...

"octopi and squids"? :-)

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No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Terminology [wikipedia.org]

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No. Either "octopuses" or "octopodes".

Re:shouldn't it be...

The word 'pus' is Greek for foot, and the plural in Greek is 'podes', so it would be octopodes -- except the name of the animal is not 'eight-feet', it's 'eight-foot', so it's one 'eight-foot' or 'octopus' and many 'eight-foots' or 'octopuses'.

If it rhymes, it must be true

In the ocean, wriggling by,

are octopuses, not octopi.

Attr. to Patricia T. O'Conner, as is the quote, "Octopi is for suckers".

Re:If it rhymes, it must be true

octopi is 25.1327412

I get suspicious...

I get suspicious whenever a creature purported to have gone extinct X million years ago is discovered alive and well.

It seems to happen with some regularity.

It seems to me, if you find a fossil of an animal you believe to be extinct, you will probably test

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I get suspicious whenever a creature purported to have gone extinct X million years ago is discovered alive and well.It seems to happen with some regularity.It seems to me, if you find a fossil of an animal you believe to be extinct, you will probably test

Do Octopus dream in octal??

Or should that be base 256?

The Thing

"Somebody in this camp ain't what he appears to be. Right now that may be one or two of us. By spring, it could be all of us."

Needs pictures

The article describes some pretty odd creatures.

I mean, without a picture of that centimeter-in-diameter protozoan, how the hell am I supposed to imagine how it looks like, much less the more important facets of such a discovery... such as how does it taste?

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I'm more interested in this one.

A new species of rock lobster in Madagascar that may be the largest in the world. Its body spans half a metre.

what, the yeti lobster didn't do it for you?

but, anyways, here you go, lotsa pictures [bbc.co.uk]

I wonder...

how tasty they are.

My god -- it's full of geeks

In the dark ocean beneath the Antarctic ice, researchers have found scores of species they've never seen before, including strange jellyfish and other gelatinous organisms that thrive without light

My god -- it's full of geeks.

Elder Things?

Yes but have they found any evidence of Elder Things [wikipedia.org] yet? Or at the very least some Shoggoths [wikipedia.org]?

New...?

As in just fell out of the tree of evolution?

...bah....

Those critter are most likely checking out the mini-subs and shaking their heads and thinking "Oh, look! A new species!"

Lake Vostok

It'll be interesting to see what they find in Lake Vostok [wikipedia.org], which is a freshwater lake as big as Lake Ontario and has been sealed under Antarctic ice for up to a million years.

Could be the perfect test for a Cryobot mission to Europa [space.com]

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So they have about 3 years to catalog all the life in the ocean? ahh hahahhaha

FTA: This is the sixth year of the marine census

You mean you didn't bother to read the article? ahh hahahhaha

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Actually I already knew how long the study had been taking place. They are attempting to catalog all the life in the oceans when we haven't even cataloged all life in the rain forests, which is a far smaller task. Now when you consider that the surface a

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What point are you trying to make, should they give up because their ultimate goal will never be reached?

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yea, I refer to this as the "cut and run" date. At which point we all know the ocean life wins. I think we need to "stay the course." Not set a date that the ocean life can hide until.

Oh, that's easy.

You label everything as one or more of "sushi", "chowder" or "probably made into soup somewhere". Saves on physiological and genetic analysis, and it's all that Joe Average is likely to care about. (If the average person gave a rat's about conservation or

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Besides, in 15 years or less there won't be enough of a food chain in the oceans to sustain most of the organisms that do still exist and without a gene bank capable of storing that kind of volume of information there's no possibility of either having any

Re:Could they be harmful?

Other then that

Seek also the difference between "then" and "than" ;)

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Sure they could be harmful. In fact, where two species evolve seperately, it is less likely that they'll be able to coexist peacefully. Just look at the species that have been introduced to Australia.

I think the greater danger here, though, is that humans

Re:

You've never been to Australia, have you.

Re:Could they be harmful?

Everything in Australia is deadly. The spiders are deadly, the snakes are deadly, the crocodiles are deadly, the plants are deadly, the driving in Sydney is definitely deadly, the TV commercials are lethal... I never did find out what happened to those rabbits that escaped from a research facility on a Government-owned island and made it to shore, back in '95. As I recall, they were being used for some research into some lethal pathogen or other. Since there are Australians still alive, I take it that the crisis was brought under control, but that was cutting it a little fine. I guess we can add the Australian Government to things that are lethal, though.

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Instead of listing all of the deadly things about Australia, it's much easier to list the non-deadly things:

- some of the sheep

Thanks Terry Pratchett.

aussie childhood, oh the memories...

I remember growing up in adelaide.

'don't' walk on the grass without shoes'
'don't lean on the hedges'
'don't go near the lizards'
'don't dig in the garden'

and in Broadbeach

'don't play with the jellyfish'
'don't go in the sea without shoes'

Not that these rules

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And don't forget koalas. They a lurking everywhere waiting for human flesh. Even a small koala can rip you apart in a matter of seconds.

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myxomatosis was released back in 1950, and suppressed the rabbit population quite thoroughly for a couple of decades before they started to evolve immunity.

Steady on. You'll start a flamewar with the creationists.

What if a bunch of rabbits intelligently d

Re:Could they be harmful?

Naaah. Since they never probably evolve near humans, they couldn't possibility be harmful.

They could have nasty pointy teeth.