- Two fish and a squid -- natives of the North Pacific -- have been found off the Falkland Islands.
- The animals were so unusual that researchers at first thought they had discovered new species.
- The best bet to explain how the animals traveled so far is frigid, deepwater currents.
A pelagic eelpout appears in this photo. When researchers stumbled upon this creature, they initially thought they may have discovered a new species. Click to enlarge this image.
Alexander Arkhipkin/Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department
Marine biologists in the Falkland Islands have identified two species of fish and a squid in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean that shouldn't be there.
The three deep-sea beasts are natives of the North Pacific, but were found at the extreme opposite end of the planet in the South Atlantic -- somehow skipping over 9,000 miles (15,000 kilometers) of warmer climate zones.
"We were surprised to see them here at all," said Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department. "We were thinking they were new species or new genera."
The best guess is that the animals skipped the warmer waters between the poles by hopping on a veritable cold-water subway system that is thought to run along the bottoms of the oceans. Such deep-sea currents would also explain why polar bears and penguins aren't among those pole-hopping animals.
Strengthening that hypothesis is the fact that the three animals -- giant rattail grenadier (Albatrossia pectoralis), pelagic eelpout (Lycodapus endemoscotus) and squid (Gonatopsis octopedatus) -- have very little else in common.
"They are completely different animals," Arkhipkin told Discovery News. "What unites them is that they are all obligatory deepwater species."
The animals were so unusual for Falkland waters that Arkhipkin and his colleagues enlisted help from molecular biologists and other specialists from around the world to pin down the identities of the animals. Their results appear in the August issue of the journal Deep Sea Research.
The idea that deepwater currents connect both poles is not new, but data to support the idea are scarce, Arkhipkin said. The fact that these three specimens were seen so far from home suggests something might be changing in the deep sea, he said.
"It's really something happening in the deepwater in the last 10 years," Arkhipkin said. "This is a proxy maybe, not direct. It's a reflection of some sort of a change in the global circulation of deepwater."
The discovery also meshes with work on deep-sea squids that suggests they, unlike other squids, can spend all the phases of their lives in very deep waters and even carry their eggs with them, explained Eric Hochberg, curator and invertebrate zoologist at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
"There seems to be another strategy of staying in deepwater throughout life cycles," said Hochberg of the depths-loving beasts.
Such a lifestyle would make it a lot more likely the squid could survive very long journeys at great depths and completely bypass temperate and tropical waters higher up.
Tags: Deep Ocean Animals, Deep Sea, Fish, Life, Marine Life
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