Mummified seals scattered across the deserts of Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys reveal that microbial communities in the region respond rapidly to environmental change.
The seal carcasses are naturally mummified by the extremely dry, cold conditions of one of the world's least hospitable climates. Craig Cary at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, and his colleagues found that undisturbed carcasses boost humidity, stabilize temperature and alter the microbial communities in the soils beneath them.
The researchers assayed how quickly those communities changed by transplanting a 250-year-old seal carcass to a pristine location. Two summers later, the microbial composition of the soil beneath the transplanted seal resembled that of the seal's original location. This challenges the hypothesis that the region's soil ecology changes only over the course of centuries.
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Seal corpses shelter Antarctic microbes. Nature 482, 278 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/482278a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/482278a
