Antartica is located in the southernmost part of the Earth, containing the South Pole. Due to its highest elevation among the continents, it is the coldest, windiest and driest continent. With this kind of coldness, crabs could not be able to live on the icy shores. King crabs or stone crabs, are a super family of crab-like ten-footed crustaceans chiefly found in cold seas.
A new research shows that king crabs could now begin to invade the chilly ecosystem through climate change. Richard Aronson, a biologist of Florida Institute of Technology, reveals in a newspaper that due to the warming coast in effects of climate change, the ecosystem has been now vulnerable for the shell-cracking king crabs to invade in.
According to Richard Aronson, lead author, professor and head of Florida's Tech's Department of Biological Sciences, stated that there is a possibility that king crab populations will migrate from their current deep-sea habitat to shallow continental shelf within the next several decades.
Even researchers shown that there's no way for them to be prevented from coming in if the water becomes even warmer. King Crabs won't find any hindrances upon migration when it comes to ocean salinity, floor sediments and food resources. Upon their arrival it will cause a great impact and shift in the ecosystem.
This would have a great effect on organisms having soft bodies such as mollusks and sea stars. Creatures in the continental shelf has been evolving ever since without shell-crushing predators and as they moved in restructuring of the ecosystem will take place.
Kathryn Smith, a postdoctoral scientist and study co-author of Florida Institute of Technology, explained that the overall effect of these migrations, would transform these unique Antartic ecosystems like other areas which ecologists call biotic homogenization. It is the process by which there is an increase of genetic, taxonomic or functional similarity due to species invasion and extinctions.
