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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

No island is an island

Floating seaweed has shuttled between land masses in the Southern Ocean with surprising frequency.
Bull kelp (Durvillaea antarctica) underwater showing holdfast, Dusky Sound, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.

The kelp Durvillaea antarctica can form rafts capable of long-distance travel in the Southern Ocean. Credit: Richard Robinson/Nature Picture Library

Over the long sweep of life’s history on Earth, birds, wind currents and even natural ‘rafts’ of vegetation have carried flora and fauna to islands old and new, and reshuffled the deck of species on continents. But such long-distance movements were considered to be extremely infrequent.

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Nature 606, 437 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01584-4

References

  1. Fraser, C. I. et al. Curr. Biol. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.05.035 (2022).

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