A few days ago Dave, an AAD engineer whose previous jobs include designing and deploying bear-cams for National Geographic magazine, took an underwater camera out on the barge to test it. The camera is for the AMISOR project, and is in a long cylindrical housing designed to fit down bore-holes they will melt deep into the Amery Ice Shelf, about 350 km west of Davis. The camera will enable them to detect the depth at which the ice shelf changes from bubbly white ice built up from atmospheric deposition, to dense ice which has solidified from the ocean underneath. Melting a hole and dropping a camera down is a much less labour-intensive method than drilling and hauling out solid cores and inspecting them on the surface.

It turns out the ocean floor in Antarctic is a freak-show. Most of its residents are affected by bizarre gigantism, such as the brittle starfish Astrotoma agassizii whose vine-like arms grow up to 70 centimetres long, can live to be over 90 years old, and stands on two legs and fishes with three. There is a beautiful featherduster worm, Perkinsiana littoralis, which fishes for food with its feathery radioles and is the largest in its genus. Collosendeis Australis, a member of the family of the largest sea-spiders in the world, also lives in the waters which lap on the shore below my donga.

Other Antarctic life-forms are shown in the pictures below, which are stills taken from Dave's video:

The mysterious lemon-with-feelers seen to the left of the burley bag is Marseniopsis mollis. Although it is a big yellow bag of mush, it is actually a mollusc - it's 'shell' is an ineffective, fragile, transparent internal layer. It keeps away predators by secreting a horrible chemical called homarine, which it gains from feeding on creatures called tunicates.

I think the disgusting intestine in this shot is the proboscis worm Parborlasia corrugatus. This is a wonderful, horrible creature that can grow up to two metres long and weigh up to 100 grams. It consists solely of a digestive system, with a simple circulatory system seemingly added as an afterthought - it has no respiratory system, and absorbs oxygen through its skin. Its digestive system includes such impressive features as a large, flexible mouth that can engulf food almost as large as itself, and a barbed, sticky harpoon which it can shoot out of its mouth to catch prey or defend itself. Its main method of defense, however, is by making itself extremely acidic - its skin is coated with a mucus which has a pH of 3.5. It looks especially disgusting when swarming en masse over prey such as sea stars and jellyfish.

Perhaps the most frightening of Antarctic creatures is Russellus Brandus, a species sighted in Antarctica over a period of many years. Although it is not a native of Antarctica - the University of Tasmania is known to house a specimen - it is most at home on the Amery Ice Shelf. It is currently bearing its CASA-less exile at Davis remarkably well.

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The best place to see more freakish Antarctic creatures is at this place here, towards which all of the picture links in this entry point. There is also a nice write-up about Ross Sea Marine Science here.