Weird Wildlife: The Real Animals of Antarctica

Caption: A tardigrade strikes a pose for the microscope. Credit: Byron Adams.

Ask anyone to name an Antarctic land animal, and chances are the response will be, “penguin.” Try again, says David Barnes, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey.

“Penguins aren’t really residents on land. All the species except for one — emperor penguins — spend most of their lives at sea,” Barnes told OurAmazingPlanet.

“And likewise the other sea birds go north during Antarctica’s winter,” he added.

It turns out that the usual suspects — penguins, seals — don’t actually live on the continent. They just visit.

“In order to see Antarctica’s resident land animals, you have to have a microscope,” Barnes said.

And one look reveals an outlandish cast of characters more suited to Lewis Carroll’s fiction than a Disney movie, both in name and ability. The continent’s natives — rotifers, tardigrades and springtails, collembola and mites — possess a bizarre array of physiological tools to survive on the coldest, windiest, highest and driest continent on Earth.

In addition, evidence is mounting that these weird Antarctic animals are remnants of a bygone age, the only survivors of a vanished world — something once thought nearly impossible.

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/2177-weird-wildlife-real-animals-antarctica-penguins.html