The polar trifecta is complete - another big news story about yet another angle of the polar conservation push. I’m not sure who decided it, but I’d say that all these articles in the last few weeks are a clear sign that some group or another has decided that polar-hotspots are the buzz issue for 2008. I say more power to them if they can ingrain that concept in the zeitgeist the same way they branded the whales and rainforests in the 1990s.

The new article addresses the possibility of sharks returning to the Antarctic seas and the havoc that would wreak on the local ecosystem. 

Sharks get a really unfair amount of bad press, but while they may not be the mindless killers of the Peter Benchley model, they are definitely natural-born eating machines. Believe it or not, the fish and other organisms living under the Antarctic ice survive at sub-freezing temperatures, thriving in an environment where any other creature would have died. It would take a change of only a couple degrees in water temperature for sharks and other predators to move back in and prey upon an ecosystem that is designed for endurance, not swift competition, and has not had to do so in millions of years.

While the writers intended to focus on sharks, it turns out that other predators are teeming just outside the Antarctic zone, waiting to move back in as soon as the time is right. Large populations of deep-water crabs, capable of surviving at extremely low temperatures, have recently been discovered in the area just surrounding the extreme Antarctic cold. It would take only a miniscule change for hordes of these generalist predators (read: eats everything) to march right into that delicate and finely-tuned ecosystem - an ecosystem so finely tuned that there are fish that have evolved to survive without blood, or to produce anti-freeze proteins to keep themselves alive.

There may be more species in other biodiversity hotspots, but there is no question that the organisms living in Antarctica are truly unique. If you’re not concerned about global warming yet, now might be the time to start.