Researchers found "thousands upon thousands" of sea anemones clinging to the bottom of an Antarctic ice shelf. Their tentacles were exposed and bobbing thought the water like "flowers on a ceiling."
"The pictures blew my mind," Marymegan Daly of Ohio State University, who studied the specimens retrieved by ANDRILL team members in Antarctica, said in a University of Nebraska-Lincoln news release.
This is the first time this chilly creature has been publically identified. In the past anemones have been discovered in Antarctica, but they were never frozen in the ice and hanging upside down like these creatures were.
The team noticed the anemones with a camera-equipped robot they were using to explore beneath the thick ice of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf. The team's goal had been to research ocean currents below the ice, but they ended up discovering more than they had bargained for.
The snowy white anemones were dubbed Edwardsiella andrillae after the Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program that discovered them.
"[The discovery was total serendipity," Frank Rack, executive director of the ANDRILL Science Management Office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and associate professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at UNL said in the news release. "When we looked up at the bottom of the ice shelf, there they were."
The finding call attention to how little we know about the mysterious and treacherous Antarctic.
"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. This goes to show how much more we have to learn about the Antarctic and how life there has adapted," Scott Borg, head of the Antarctic Sciences Section in the NSF's Division of Polar Programs, said in the news release.
"They had found a whole new ecosystem that no one had ever seen before," Rack said. "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."
The anemones an inch long when contracted and up to four inches longer when relaxed. Each had between 20 and 24 tentacles and an inside ring of between 12 and 16 appendages
In the future the team hopes to discover how these creatures survive in such an icy climate and what their diet consists of.
