A British Antarctic Survey team has discovered cyanobacteria living in a remote region of the South Pole. Several scientists, including Annick Wilmotte and Rafael Fernandez-Carazo, of the University of Liège’s Life Sciences department, have studied samples which have been removed in order to establish the biological diversity of this region, in which the living conditions are hardly clement.

Situated at a latitude of 82° South, with temperatures which skirt -35°C in Winter and where the mercury is always far from going beyond the 0°C mark, the Dufek Massif in Antarctica is not the destination the most sought after by tourist agencies. Yet nevertheless a team of British Antarctic Survey scientists has found forms of life there. Cyanobacteria which are not very sensitive to the cold are living there with complete impunity, safe from any threat which might result from their hardly enviable rank on the food chain, as they are nearly the only species which exists there.  ‘It is the first time that a simple aquatic ecosystem has been observed at such a latitude,’ explains Annick Wilmotte, a FNRS Research Associate in physiology and bacterial genetics at the University of Liège’s Life Sciences department. ‘We had already discovered life in Antarctica, but it was often in coastal regions, where the conditions are milder and life is more abundant.’

What explains the originality of this discovery is the difficulty the researchers had in reaching the interior of these regions and the logistics which had to be put in place. ‘The researchers who went there recently, for example, only stayed there for three days. They had to work very quickly to gather their samples. And since the discovery of the Dufek Massif in 1957 there have only been three expeditions to the area. The first were simply geological, and it is only recently that the idea was formed of sending biologists who could observe the region from a different perspective.’ And it was a success as several cyanobacteria genotypes were discovered there, as well as green algae, protists, bacteria and two types of small invertebrates.