SO-AntEco

The South Orkney Islands is a small archipelago located in the Southern Ocean, 375 miles north-east of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The seafloor around the South Orkney Islands has been shown to be an area with exceptionally high biodiversity. The marine animals there represent approximately one fifth of all species recorded for the entire Southern Ocean.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) closed all finfish fisheries around the South Orkney Islands in 1989, and in 2009 they established the South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf Marine Protected Area (SOISS MPA), the first MPA located entirely within the High Seas anywhere on the planet.

SO-AntEco was a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) led expedition undertaken in conjunction with an international team of scientists from the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) AntEco research programme. The team included participants from 9 different countries and 16 institutes. It also involved scientists from four UK universities (Bristol, Hull, Liverpool and Oxford) and the Natural History Museum in London. The expedition took place on board the BAS research ship the RRS James Clark Ross in early 2016 and was the sister project of the Krill Hotspots project. This expedition aimed to address aspects of all four of the BAS Grand Challenges for polar science.

 

The SO-AntEco expedition investigated the diversity of life both inside and outside of the SOISS MPA region in order to better understand the distribution and composition of the seafloor communities around islands. We  undertook a research cruise that explored the different seafloor habitats to investigate if different environments support different communities of animals. Understanding where animals that are vulnerable to fishing and other human impacts (such as corals and sponges) live will help us to manage the region’s natural resources in the future.