Stowaways found hitching ride on seaweed

[Judi Lynn]

Stowaways found hitching ride on seaweed
Wednesday, 15 September 2010 Katherine Nightingale
ABC

Scientists in New Zealand have shown for the first time that sedentary coastal creatures can travel long distances at sea by hitching a ride on seaweed.

Researchers have long thought that animals such as molluscs and sea stars, which cannot travel far under their own steam, must 'raft' from one coast to another. But so far evidence for rafting has been circumstantial.

Now a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand have confirmed such a trip.

Dr Ceridwen Fraser, a zoologist at the university's Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, and colleagues analysed bull kelp, a monster-sized seaweed often found floating in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current of the Southern Ocean.

Genetic tests on specimens of bull kelp washed up on a beach in the country's South Island showed that the kelp must have come hundreds of kilometres from either the sub-Antarctic Auckland or Snare Islands.

More:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/09/15/3012147.htm

[BrklynLiberal]

1. cool stuff!

[formercia]

2. Been to the Snares

We took a scientific expedition there. Nobody had been to the islands in 20 years, so they wanted to do a survey of the wildlife.

The penguins would see the motor-whaleboat leaving the ship and they would swim out to meet it and follow it to shore. The Fur Seals were tame to where you could walk up to them without them being skittish. Sea birds would land on deck out of curiosity.



Amazing place. Only the isolation and that it's a wildlife reserve, keep humans from ruining it.