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Bone-eating worms from the Antarctic: the contrasting fate of whale and wood remains on the Southern Ocean seafloor

Glover, AG; Wiklund, H; Taboada, S; Avila, C; Cristobo, J; Smith, CR; Kemp, KM; ... Dahlgren, TG; + view all (2013) Bone-eating worms from the Antarctic: the contrasting fate of whale and wood remains on the Southern Ocean seafloor. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 280 (1768) p. 20131390. 10.1098/rspb.2013.1390. Green open access

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Abstract

We report the results from the first experimental study of the fate of whale and wood remains on the Antarctic seafloor. Using a baited free-vehicle lander design, we show that whale-falls in the Antarctic are heavily infested by at least two new species of bone-eating worm, Osedax antarcticus sp. nov. and Osedax deceptionensis sp. nov. In stark contrast, wood remains are remarkably well preserved with the absence of typical wood-eating fauna such as the xylophagainid bivalves. The combined whale-fall and wood-fall experiment provides support to the hypothesis that the Antarctic circumpolar current is a barrier to the larvae of deep-water species that are broadly distributed in other ocean basins. Since humans first started exploring the Antarctic, wood has been deposited on the seafloor in the form of shipwrecks and waste; our data suggest that this anthropogenic wood may be exceptionally well preserved. Alongside the new species descriptions, we conducted a comprehensive phylogenetic analyses of Osedax, suggesting the clade is most closely related to the frenulate tubeworms, not the vestimentiferans as previous reported.

Type: Article
Title: Bone-eating worms from the Antarctic: the contrasting fate of whale and wood remains on the Southern Ocean seafloor
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1390
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.1390
Language: English
Additional information: © 2013 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: whale-fall, wood-fall, Annelida, Polychaeta, Siboglinidae, Xylophaga
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1470437
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