Land fauna

The native land fauna is wholly invertebrate. Apparently climatically less tolerant and less easily dispersed, the fauna follows plant colonization of newly deglaciated regions and therefore is not as widely distributed. The Antarctic microfauna includes heliozoans, rotifers, tardigrades, nematodes, and ciliate protozoans. The protozoans dominate soil and freshwater communities. The terrestrial macrofauna consists entirely of arthropods, many species being parasitic on birds and seals. The principal arthropod groups represented include Acarina (mites), Mallophaga (biting lice), Collembola (springtails), Anoplura (sucking lice), Diptera (midges), and Siphonaptera (fleas). Two species of beetles, probably alien, are known from islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. The dominant free-living forms, mites and springtails, live under stones and are associated with spore-reproducing plants.

Birds

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About 45 species of birds live south of the Antarctic Convergence, but only three—the emperor penguin, Antarctic petrel, and South Polar (McCormick’s) skua—breed exclusively on the continent or on nearby islands. An absence of mammalian land predators and the rich offshore food supply make Antarctic coasts a haven for immense seabird rookeries. Penguins, of the order Sphenisciformes, symbolize this polar region, though they live on seacoasts throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Of the 18 living species, only the Adélie and emperor live along the Antarctic coastline. The habitats of five other polar species—king, chinstrap, gentoo, rockhopper, and macaroni—extend only as far south as the northern Antarctic Peninsula and subantarctic islands. The evolution of these flightless birds has been traced to the Eocene Epoch, about 40 million years ago, using fossils found on Seymour Island, off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and at a few other places. The largest modern penguin, the emperor, standing between 3 and 4 feet (0.9 and 1.2 metres) tall, would be dwarfed by some of its extinct New Zealand and Seymour Island relatives, the fossil bones of which indicate that they reached heights up to 5.6 feet (1.7 metres). Some authorities believe that penguins may have a shared ancestry with other birds of Antarctica, capable of flight, from the order Procellariiformes. Birds of that order, mainly species of petrels but also a few of albatrosses, make up more than half of the Antarctic and subantarctic breeding species. Other birds of the region include species of cormorants, pintails, gulls, terns, sheathbills, and pipits.

Banding and recovery studies show that some Antarctic birds travel throughout the world. Rare sightings of skuas and petrels far in the continental interior, even near the South Pole, suggest that these powerful birds may occasionally cross the continent. Experiments show that Antarctic birds, including the flightless penguin, have strong homing instincts and excellent navigational capability; they apparently have a highly developed sun-azimuth orientation system and biological clock mechanism that functions even with the sun remaining continuously high. Adélie penguins released as far as 1,900 miles from their nests, for example, are known to have returned within a year.

Feeding habits vary widely from species to species. Most depend on the abundantly provisioned larder of the sea. The seabirds feed mainly on crustacea, fish, and squid, mostly at the surface or, in the case of cormorants and penguins, at depths down to about 150 feet. Shorebirds forage for mollusks, echinoderms, and littoral crustacea. Sheathbills, the southern black-backed gull, giant petrels, and skuas feed occasionally, as allowed, on other birds’ unguarded eggs. The voracious skua and giant petrel are even known to attack the young or weak of other species, particularly penguins.

Dependent upon seafood, most birds leave the continent each autumn and follow Antarctica’s “secondary” coastline as the ice pack builds northward. The emperor penguins, however, are the exception, remaining behind as solitary guardians (other than humans) of the continent through the long winter night. The emperors, once thought rare, number about 600,000 birds in more than 40 known colonies.

Sea life

The prolific zooplankton of Antarctic waters feed on the copious phytoplankton and, in turn, form the basic diet of whales, seals, fish, squid, and seabirds. The Antarctic waters, because of their upwelled nutrients, are more than seven times as productive as subantarctic waters. The most important organism in the higher food chain is the small, shrimplike krill, Euphausia superba, only an inch or two in length when mature. But for their habit of congregating in vast, dense schools, they would have little food value for the large whales and seals. Their densities are great, however, and a whale, with built-in nets of baleen and hairlike fibres, can strain out meals of a ton or more in a few minutes. During the three to four months spent in Antarctic waters, the original population of baleen whales alone could consume an estimated 150 million short tons (about 136 million metric tons) of krill. Animals on the sea bottom of the nearshore zone include the sessile hydrozoans (see also cnidarian), corals, sponges, and bryozoans, as well as the foraging crablike pycnogonids and isopods, the annelid worm polychaeta, echinoids, sea stars (starfish), and a variety of crustaceans and mollusks. Winter and anchor ice, however, keep the sublittoral zone (the permanently submerged region of the marine environment) relatively barren to about 50 feet (15.2 metres) in depth.

Of the nearly 30,000 species of modern fish, no more than about 100 are known from seas south of the Antarctic Convergence. Nearly three-fourths of the 90 or so sea-bottom species belong to the superfamily Notothenioidea, the Antarctic perches. At sea bottom there are also the Zoarcidae, or eel-pouts; the Liparidae, or sea snails; the Macrouridae, or rat-tailed fishes; and the Gadidae, or codlike fishes. Rare nonbony types in the Antarctic zone include hagfish and skates. Many species of deep-sea fish are known south of the Antarctic Convergence, but only three, a barracuda and two lantern fishes, seem to be confined to this zone. Antarctic fishes are well adapted to the cold waters; the bottom fish are highly endemic, 90 percent of the species being found nowhere else. This supports other biological and geologic evidence that Antarctica has been isolated for a very long time.

Antarctic native mammals are all marine and include seals (pinnipeds), porpoises, dolphins, and whales (cetaceans). Only one otariid, or fur seal, breeds south of the Antarctic Convergence; four species of phocids, or true seals—the gregarious Weddell seal, the ubiquitous crabeater seal, the solitary and aggressively carnivorous leopard seal, and the rarely seen Ross seal—breed almost exclusively in the Antarctic zone, and another, the southern elephant seal, breeds near the Convergence at South Georgia, Kerguelen, and Macquarie islands. The sea lion, an otariid, is plentiful in the Falkland Islands but probably never ventures into the cold Antarctic waters. The fur seal and the elephant seal are now regenerating after near extinction. Weddell seals are thought to number about 1,000,000, the crabeater about 8,000,000, and the Ross seals between 50,000 and 220,000. Weddell seals are unique in being able to survive under fast ice, even in winter, by maintaining open breathing holes with their teeth. The leopard seal, armed with powerful jaws and huge canines, is one of the few predators of adult penguins. A number of mummified seal carcasses, chiefly crabeaters, have been found at distances of nearly 30 miles (48.2 km) from the sea and at elevations up to about 3,000 feet (914 metres) in the McMurdo dry valleys. Finding no food in such inland wanderings, the crabeaters eventually died, and their leathery carcasses were preserved by the coldness and aridity of the climate.

Whales and their cetacean relatives, porpoises and dolphins, range widely from Arctic to Antarctic waters and are found in all oceans and seas. A number of species range to, but generally not across, the Antarctic Convergence and so are considered only peripheral Antarctic types. Among the fish- and squid-eating toothed whales, or odontocetes, are a few peripheral Antarctic porpoises and dolphins and the pilot whale. More typical of Antarctic waters are the killer whale, sperm whale, and rare bottle-nosed, or beaked, whale. Seven species of baleen, or whalebone, whales also inhabit Antarctic waters, subsisting on the plentiful krill; these include the southern right whale, the humpback whale, and four kinds of rorqual—the blue whale, fin whale, sei whale, and lesser rorqual, or minke. The pygmy right whale is endemic to Antarctic and subantarctic waters. The killer whale, one of the most intelligent of marine animals, hunts in packs and feeds on larger animals, such as fish, penguins and other aquatic birds, seals, dolphins, and other whales. Despite its name, there have been no authenticated accounts of attacks on humans near Antarctica. Excessive slaughter in the past has drastically decimated stocks of the larger whales, particularly the giant blue whales. Near extinction, the blue whales have been protected by international agreement.

Alien mammals that now reside semipermanently in Antarctic and subantarctic regions include sheep, rabbits, dogs, cats, rats, mice, and human beings. Effects on local ecosystems are great, from pollution of station areas by human wastes to erosion from overgrazing by sheep and to decimation of bird populations by dogs and cats and of whale and fur-seal stocks by humans. Even so, Antarctica remains by far the least contaminated land on Earth. Under the Antarctic Treaty, it is designated as a special conservation area, and many former human activities have been prohibited in an attempt to preserve the natural ecological system of the unique environment.