Bone-Eating Worms Found In Antarctic Waters 38
sciencehabit writes "When you drop a whale backbone into Antarctic waters and retrieve it a year later, you'll find it covered with a pelt of wriggling, rosy-hued worms. Drop a chunk of wood in the same spot, and you'll discover that it's hardly changed. That's the result of a simple experiment to find out if some of the world's weirdest worms also live in Antarctic waters. The discovery extends the range of bone-eating worms to the Southern Ocean and suggests that Antarctic shipwrecks may be remarkably intact."
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they do "research" that is much less scientific.
"I wonder if THIS whale tastes any different to the others we have caught today...."
Depth, temperature and current more important (Score:4, Insightful)
At any location a few hundred miles out of the coast, the chances of wood ending up there are way too small for any species to rely on that. In general, almost all wood floats. Wooden ship wrecks sink mainly because ships have ballast and metal bits, or the lighter than water parts are eaten by bacteria. It's the same bacteria that eventually will make all thrift wood sink, unless it's washed ashore somewhere. Wood that is heavier than water by itself tends to not end up far from shores anyway.
Given the fact that wood is a rare food source under water regardless of where you are, the question is what the wildlife that causes ship wrecks to decay feasts on when they are lacking historical nautical drama to dine on. Apparently the Antarctic seas aren't providing enough of that to be a sustainable habitat for these creatures. There are plenty of algae available in the higher layers of the Antarctic seas, or they wouldn't be able to sustain the krill population that the whales and fish feed on, but it could very well be that that is the only plant life and no larger plants are growing there. I haven't bothered looking that up, but it sounds to me that this is a much more likely explanation than "lack of trees on land" would be.
Pristine and intact. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Just picture famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, which sank in 1915 in western Antarctic waters. Its pine and oak hull now lie on the sea floor, most likely pristine and intact, awaiting discovery."
That ship was crushed to pieces in the ice, hardly pristine and intact.