Due to the rapidly rising temperatures, king crabs are slowly making their way to the Antarctica coastline, which could potentially destroy the existing ecosystem.
At present, the Antarctica coastline is home to delicate invertebrates like sea stars and marine worms. Due to the ongoing global climate change, the shores of Antarctica is becoming warmer. King crabs could not get too close to Antarctica because of the conditions, in the past. The conditions were generally too cold for them as king crabs cannot survive in waters which have temperatures lower than 1 degree Celsius. But as the area gets heated up, there is no barrier left for king crabs to invade Antarctic shelf and disrupt the ecosystem.
“Depth profiles of temperature, salinity, habitat structure, food availability and predators indicate that there are no barriers to prevent for king crabs from moving upward onto the outer shelf at 400-500 m. A cold water barrier above 200 m could be breached within the few next decades,” commented lead researcher of the study, Richard Aronson, a researcher at Florida Institute of Technology.
The arrival of these king crabs could have a massive impact on the local ecosystem as they usually feed on such kind of soft organisms that are commonly found on Antarctic shelf.
“Because other creatures on the continental shelf have evolved without shell-crushing predators, if the crabs moved in they could radically restructure the ecosystem,” added Aronson.
To quantify the presence of the king crabs in the region, Aronson and his colleagues conducted a photographic survey off the Marguerite Bay on the Western Antarctic Peninsula and found that plenty of crabs were crawling down close to the shelf itself. They looked stable and were producing eggs with the possibility of moving up on the lower end of Antarctic Continental shelf over the next few years.
Aronson’s findings are very similar to those of Craig Smith, a biological oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His team found another population of king crabs in an area called the Palmer Deep, which is north of the region where Aronson and his group conducted their study.
Smith suggested that it’s likely “just a matter of time before the crabs move up onto the shelf.”
“The barriers for these predators are starting to evaporate,” commented Aronson.
Steven Myers
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