At the bottom of the ocean floor, wrecked ships and whale carcasses are often found eroded, but in the Antarctic, ships are often found in terrific condition because of certain deep-sea scavengers, Nature reported.
Hunters of wrecked ships will have their best luck at the bottom of Antarctic waters because two new species of worms have been discovered to feed primarily off the bones of decaying whale. The worms also avoid decaying wood and, in fact, any other marine invertebrates that do feed on rotting wood do not inhabit those waters.
The findings are detailed in a study published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The two new species are called antarcticus and deceptionensis, both belonging to the genus Osedax, the Latin word for "bone devourer."
"The deep sea that surrounds the Antarctic continent is one of the least explored ecosystems on Earth," Adrian Glover, of The Natural History Museum, told Discovery News. "The organisms that live there are dependent on a supply of food from the surface, in extreme examples this can be the remains of a whale or piece of wood. These large 'organic-falls' are unstudied in Antarctica."
For the study, the researchers left samples of whalebone and wooden planks at the bottom of an Antarctic sea for a year before re-collecting them. When they did, they found the wood to be no more than waterlogged, while the whalebone was infested with the antarcticus worms.
Glover and his team believe the ice-cold waters are a deterrent from wood-eating worms and therefore said it would be an ideal area for shipwreck hunters to work. However, they acknowledged the dangers of diving in such cold waters and that their research may not have provided enough proof for such divers to make the trip.
"It is possible that our experiments were not left long enough, or that the size of the lots of wood, or the presence of whalebone, has inhibited larval development," the researchers stated. They also noted that wood-eating worms have been proven in previous studies to infest their target in three months.
"Since humans first started exploring the Antarctic, wood has been deposited on the seafloor in the form of shipwrecks and waste," the authors wrote. "Our data suggest that this anthropogenic wood may be exceptionally well preserved."
