Penguin and seal poop fuel Antarctica

Nitrogen-rich droppings from colonies of cute penguins and seals are the foundation of Antarctica’s biodiversity.

For more than half a century, biologists studying Antarctica focused their research on understanding how organisms coped with the continent’s severe drought and the coldest conditions on the planet.

One thing they didn’t really factor in, however, was the role played by the nitrogen-rich droppings from colonies of cute penguins and seals — until now.

A new study published in the journal Current Biology found the influential excrement supported thriving communities of mosses and lichens, which in turn sustained vast numbers of microscopic animals such as springtails and mites for more than 1000m beyond the colony.

“What we see is that the poo produced by seals and penguins partly evaporates as ammonia,” said co-author and ecologist Stef Bokhorst from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

“Then the ammonia gets picked up by the wind and is blown inland, and this makes its way into the soil and provides the nitrogen that primary producers need in order to survive in this landscape.”

Braving bitter temperatures, the researchers waded through fields of animal waste — not to mention hordes of elephant seals and gentoo, chinstrap, and Adelie penguins — to examine the surrounding soils and plants using infra-red gas analysers that measured their respiration.

Samples examined in labs revealed that there were millions of tiny invertebrates per square metre because of the lack of predators in their environment — unlike in European or American grasslands, where the number may typically be between 50,000 and 100,000.

“The more animals we get, the larger the footprint there is, and we’re finding higher diversity in those sites,” Mr Bokhorst said, emphasising that species’ richness was linked less with how cold or dry the region was and more to the nutrients added by the excrement. Ultimately, the research found penguin colonies to be a proxy for bio­diversity.

AFP