60 million ice fish nests discovered near Antarctica

The Weddell Sea south of Antarctica is the place to find a mate, if you’re an ice fish.

A team of scientists recently discovered about 60 million nests of ice fish on the seafloor.

As Live Science Autun Purser of the Alfred Wegener Institute and his team of researchers on the RV Polarstern were monitoring the marine area when graduate student Lilian Böhringer called to the bridge. She closely watched the video feed of the Weddell seafloor, obtained from the Ocean Bottom Observation and Measurement System (OFOBS), a one-ton camera towed behind the ship.

Böhringer is seeing fish rigs in the distance that the camera can pick up light.

“The camera is moving [across the seafloor] and it doesn’t stop. They’re everywhere,” Böhringer told Live Science.

“We found the nest after the fish had nested for four hours,” says Purser. “Nothing but a fish’s nest.”

Most of the nests are looked after by a single adult fish and contain about 1,700 eggs, a pattern that repeats in dots across the seafloor for 93 square miles, the largest ever recorded.

Based on Axios, researchers had previously found groups of only a few dozen icefish nests at a time. So why are there millions of occurrences south of the Weddell Sea?

One theory is that warmer water currents can move more easily and, when flowing together, essentially turn the fish into a single large spawning school.

Purser and team wrote in their study, published in the journal Current Biology.

“Concurrently collected seal migration and historical data indicate that this concentrated fish biomass could be utilized by predators such as Weddell seals,” the study writes. “Many degraded fish carcasses in and near nesting sites suggest that, dead as well as alive, these fish provide inputs to the local food web and influence local biochemical processes.” .”

Since the colony was discovered, efforts are currently underway to designate it as a Marine Protected Area under the International Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Biological Resources.

Learn more in the video below.