Lush Life

Lush Life

One of my earlier blogs asked the question about how the creatures of the Antarctic region were thriving versus striving. Now I am ready to attempt an answer.
After seeing the exuberant riot of living masses on Salisbury Plain and Saint Andrews Bay one could not deny that these creatures have found a secret to not just eking out a living, but having capitalized on a rich, deep and renewable well of LIFE.

These are creatures of the sea: lustrous Fur Seals, blubbery fat Elephant Seals, sleek, golden-cheeked King Penguins, attendant scavenging Skuas, Chicken-like Snowy Sheathbills, keening Kelp Gulls and the scary dinosauric Giant Petrels looking for the weak and unattended all surrounded by tall, vibrant, green Tussock Grasses and swaying kelp forests just off shore. The place owes it all to the ocean. It starts with tiny, microscopic diatoms, cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates that capture the energy of the sun and use it to convert carbon dioxide and water into energy. They are profligate and generous producing sugars, fats and proteins in abundance. Slightly larger, but still microscopic, Protozoans gobble up the bounty on offer. Increasing size continues through Copepods, Arrow worms, larval crustaceans, worms, fish, sea stars and jellies. The keystone creature here in the Antarctic waters is a small crustacean about the size (and color) of a baby's pinkie finger called Krill. They resemble and are related to shrimp. They are a key species because they link the microscopic to the macroscopic. The unseen to the seeable. They can see, find and consume a universe of pinhead sized and often clear organisms that make a rich soup of sealife. On that they grow in uncountable gazillions. Krill turn the ocean red. These are the food of the great whales, leviathans that reach 90 feet in length and weigh one hundred tons. They also feed penguins, seals and the soaring seabirds.

These animals grow fat on the gushing current that sweeps Krill from the ice edge and out into the Southern Ocean to feed the penguin colonies and the haul-outs of the giant seals that wallow on the beaches. The excrement of the teeming hordes is just Krill fertilizer ground into the new soils of the recently glaciated shores made available by retreating ice.

The concentration and abundance of organisms here is really staggering. Our ancestors saw hordes like this regularly, but to our modern eyes it is shocking. It is hard to comprehend. It is prehistoric and unexpected in a world where we are so used to being dominant and the animals are peripheral. Here, we are minimized, insignificant, ignored, a comically small, speck of a sideshow and it feels so right.

The first colony I visited at Salisbury Plain changed the color of an entire huge hillside about the size of three football fields. From there it spread like a living lava flow onto a vast plain covering three times that area. When no one else was near I stood facing the colony, my back to the sea from which they came, my nose wrinkled from the smell, my ears filled with the cacophony of call and response and a smile spread across my face as an offering of thanks to the ocean behind me that brought this lush life to be. I was so happy to be a witness to what nature could produce unmolested by human interference.