Antarctic Octopus Living Testament To Global Warming
The octopus, formerly known as both a delicacy food item and for being thrown onto the ice at hockey games, now has a new recognition: a living testament to the effects of global warming.
Genetic information from an Antarctic octopus species adds to a growing body of evidence of at least a partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) during a previous interglacial period (like during the Eemian interglacial some 125,000 years ago).
Members of Turquet’s octopuses (pictured) tend to live in one place and only move to escape predators. This led to the understanding that specimens from areas on either side of Antarctica would be genetically different. What scientists found after examining specimens from each side of the WAIS was that both populations were genetically nearly identical.
Dr Phill Watts, from the University’s Institute of Integrative Biology, explains: “We expected to find a marked difference between Turquet’s octopuses living in different regions of the ocean, particularly between areas that are currently separated by approximately 10,000 km of sea. These creatures don’t like to travel and so breeding between the populations in the Ross and Weddell Seas [now separated by those 10,000 km of ocean] would have been highly unusual.”
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