New research suggests global warming could soon drive Antarctic king crabs to become major predators, which is a role they have not played for the tens of millions of years.
The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming places on Earth, and the rising temperatures could cause king crabs to leave their deep-sea habitats and move to the shallow continental shelf within the next decade, the Florida Institute of Technology reported.
"Because other creatures on the continental shelf have evolved without shell-crushing predators, if the crabs moved in they could radically restructure the ecosystem," said lead author Richard Aronson, professor and head of Florida Tech's Department of Biological Sciences.
To make their findings, the researchers used an underwater camera sled to observe a never-before-studied group of king crabs off Marguerite Bay on the western Antarctic Peninsula. The initial data suggests the crabs will move into shallower waters in the near future.
"The only way to test the hypothesis that the crabs are expanding their depth-range is to track their movements through long-term monitoring," said James McClintock of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), another author of the study.
The effect of these crabs migrating into shallower waters would likely transform the unique Antarctic ecosystem into one that more closely resembles ecosystems in other parts of the world in a phenomenon known as biotic homogenization. The researchers believe some of these changes could dramatically alter the Antarctic sea-floor ecosystem, and could even reduce the diversity of marine ecosystems across the globe.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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