Prof Angelika Brandt and her team’s ground breaking discovery of more than 700 new species of marine life in the Weddell deep sea is amazing! It has completely shaken up and turned around many old beliefs about biodiversity in the Antarctic.Prof Angelika Brandt’s fascination for exploring life in the Antarctic deep sea can be traced back to her student days. During that time Angelika went on 12 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic including a Brazilian-German diving expedition in 1989 / 90 on King George Island (South Shetland Islands).
Later, as Professor at the University of Hamburg, she continued with her research into exploring life in the Antarctic Ocean deep sea. As head of the ANDEEP project that had 55 scientists from 14 different institutes from around the world, Prof Brandt guided research that explored life at the bottom of the Weddell deep sea.
In this interview Prof Angelika Brandt shares interesting experiences about how she and her team came to make this amazing discovery of 700 new species…
A discovery like this has not been reported from the Antarctic deep sea in the last 100 years.
What does it feel like to explore the ocean floor 20 000 feet below the sea?
It's quite an interesting venture because there's not very much known about the deep sea floor. I have had a colleague from Scotland who once told people in a lecture, that we know as much about the deep sea ocean floor as a football field, in comparison to all land masses worldwide.
We really know very, very little. All that you read in newspapers and magazines about deep sea creatures is a very small impression that we get about life down there. For us to explore the Antarctic was quite an interesting experience because there was so little known before.
Polarstern and Bellingshausen seafloor
If there have been surveys done, most of the surveys are geologic or geophysical surveys but there have been very few surveys by biologists. There were a few surveys done by Russian biologists in the last century with the research vessel VEMA.
But if you look at the zoogeographical map, there are blank areas all around the Southern Ocean deep sea. They have not been sampled at all. There are no surveys about the animal distribution in the Antarctic deep sea. It was a challenge to go there and to find out what's living there.
It's very exciting to do a study like this. Were all of you living on the icebreaker Polarstern all the time between 2002 and 2005?
We have done three expeditions within the framework 
of the project ANDEEP. The first two projects were in 2002 and the third project was done in 2005. Altogether, it was six months.
Weddell deep sea station
We took 40 complete deep sea stations. All the deep sea stations were usually managed in a similar comparative way. We deployed the same set of gears in a standardized way so that we could compare the results.
Here's the icebreaker RV Polarstern
How big was your team? You have scientists from 14 different research organizations from many different countries participating in the ANDEEP Project? How easy was it for you to coordinate research on this project?
Our aim was to look at different animal class types and to compare the zoo geographical pattern and the distribution of animals from protists and small meiofauna to mega fauna animals. In Germany, we do not have enough taxonomists, ecologists, systematists and other biologists who are specialized in deep sea research or would be able to cover all animal groups.
So, we tried to get the best experts from different places for all these different animal groups. That was the start of ANDEEP. First of all, we wrote the background about the project, why it was important to go to the Southern deep sea. Once we did that, we sent the information to 50 different deep sea biologists from around the world and asked them for their opinion. We got an interesting feedback from all of them saying that it was absolutely important and that you need to go.
Then, we applied for ship time. We tried to get a very good team together from all over the world. That's the reason why we took so many specialists from different nations on board.
When did you first decide to do the ANDEEP Project? Was that in 1999? 1998?
We really decided to go on for ANDEEP Project in 1998. The starting point was being on a vessel, being on the RV Polarstern and trying to get a sample. In those days, I had started with my Antarctic Project. I had worked in the Antarctic when I was a PhD student; I worked on the origin of isopods. At that time, I had already realized that there was nothing done in the Southern Ocean deep sea.
If you just look at the patterns, you find out that you have no idea about what really lies in the deep sea and especially when you compare the material in other areas. You realize immediately that you need to know about the Southern Ocean deep sea.
As a post-doc, I worked in the Arctic in an ecological special project supported by the German Science Foundation called “Environmental Changes, the Northern North Atlantic”.
As a Professor at the University of Hamburg, I also started with Antarctic research again. I applied for money to work on polychaetes. We take care of this animal group in my museum. I take care of collections of polychaetes besides crustaceans.
I got Brigitte Hilbig (now Ebbe) from Woods Hole to work with me for three years as a post-doc. When we went on board, we wanted to collect deep sea material because Brigitte wanted to compare Southern Ocean deep sea polychaetes with all her experience from the deep sea ocean of the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.
It was very, very difficult to have shallow water biologists working together with us on the project. That's because if you really want to sample the deep sea, you face a lot of problems. First of all, logistic problems, depending on the sea, it can be quite difficult to get the gear down.
It takes a lot of time. It also costs a lot of money of course. You need eight hours for one sample. The sample is more expensive than a sample in the shallow water which you can get in no time. Besides this, we also experienced enormous pressure from shallow water biologists asking us to be quicker and quicker.
That's when we realized that it's very, very important to get a station only for deep sea biologists without arguing with people all the time. That's the reason why we started this.
We started in 98 doing the writing, the background, trying to obtain the funding later in 1999. In the Southern Ocean, you also need to go with an icebreaker. You need an icebreaker in order to set up a deep sea station. It's not possible to go and do research immediately there because of all the ice. You can only do research like that in summer. That's why we were really dependent on RV Polarstern or any other icebreaker.
Would you like to share with us some of your most memorable experiences during your underwater expeditions?
Of course, it's very difficult to say. There were moments when the gear came back in heavy sea that we were very happy when there was a sample (what worked out all the time with the epibenthic sledge). RV Polarstern lies 11.5 metres deep in the water. It is therefore a very good ship for heavy sea. When we could not deploy grabs or corers, we could still use the epibenthic sledge, even though the ship moved quite much.
In this picture you can see the epibenthic sledge with full cod ends and closed samplers.
It was a challenge to deploy gear from a shaking ship, and when you want to take a sample that's 5000 meters below the sea level one has to put out 7500 m of cable, and if you would try to see your gear behind the ship if it would be at water level, you
would not be able to spot it. Return of the epibenthic sledge
A deployment of a trawled gear in these depths can take roughly 8 hours and one never knows what the gear was doing on the seafloor, whether it would collect perfectly or not. We always had to watch the tension meter carefully in order to see any blockade of the gear, for example behind a big dropstone. Once we saw the silvery shine of the gear being back at the surface, I was happy the gear was still there. Then, when the gear was on deck it was always a relief to see the material in the sledge after such a long time of deployment.
To be honest, the sledge was most useful. We did not have a single failure during all those three years of our expedition. That was quite interesting and very surprising to me.
Marguerite bay at dusk
We had some beautiful moments in the ice seeing seals and penguins on the ice flows or sometimes whales around the vessel. Even though sampling was happening, there's always time in between since all the 55 scientists are not sampling at the same time. We have some beautiful photographs of deep sea explorations and some beautiful underwater videos which Bob Diaz from Virginia took with his underwater camera system.
It was nice to see the elephant seals, leopard seals, or watch the penguins jumping in the water. There were beautiful moments of being in a fantastic and peaceful landscape.
Some moments after the expeditions were also indescribable, for example, when we met for the workshops and put all the material, put all our data on the table and started seeing patterns after a long time spent in identification, from the beginning up to now, up to the end.
It's not the end really. We are still working with the ANDEEP samples, with the content analysis of the key species of animals, trying to find out what they eat. We did not find time for that. We can still continue working with ANDEEP material.
Even now, after so many years it's still a very, very nice feeling about this expedition. I really have to say that ANDEEP was so successful because we had a fantastic team. Without a fantastic team, you can never manage to achieve a goal where everybody contributes a little to the whole picture. They
My working group photograph: Standing from left to righ: Juergen Guerrero-Kommritz, Wiebke Broekeland, Somine Brandao, Madhumita Choudhury, Marina Malyutina and Saskia Brix
Seated: Cornelia Warneke-Cremer, myself, Bente Stransky and Stefanie Kaiser
As a leader of the team, you must have been a source of great inspiration for all the younger team members isn't it?
Yes, may be but it's really not one person, about whether one person is responsible for the success or failure of a venture. It really depends on the characters aboard and whether they are willing to contribute to a common goal.
I really have to say that the US Sloan Foundation have achieved an enormous goal of trying to tie up international organizations. The ANDEEP Project contributes to the CeDAMar project (the abyssal field project of CoML). People really felt like they contributed to a general goal with ANDEEP, even if it was just a little bit. Everybody realized that it was very important to contribute to CoML, to understand what lives in the ocean, to work out programs for environmental protection, and ANDEEP was and is part of all this.
How can we protect life in the ocean if we do not understand what lives there. All these questions were so simple, so obvious to people. Even though you have simple questions, it's only possible to answer this by doing the research.
The ocean is a vast area and covers 70% of our world and the deep sea is 90% of all ocean areas. People were aware that with every single species discovered, they would contribute to a major international CoML goal. May be in a way CoML was also responsible for the success of ANDEEP.
You and your team have discovered 158 live species of forams. Would you please share with us the unusual and interesting features about the forams and other animals in the Weddel Sea?
The Weddel Sea is quite an interesting area in the Southern Ocean because there's a lot of deep water production. The deep water gets established around the ice. The water is very cold and very salty. Because of being very salty and cold, the water is very dense and heavy and it settles down. We have a major production of Antarctic Bottom Water in the Weddell Sea., which generates the world's ocean circulation.
The water column in the Weddell Sea is almost isothermal. In the deep sea, the temperature difference is just 1-1.5 degrees C plus. This temperature difference does not really matter as much as in the tropics where you have 30 degrees C on the surface and 2 degrees C in the deep sea.
Thus, in the Weddell Sea, there's a lot of potential for migration of animals from shelf to deep sea. In the Atlantic for example, we could really document this with zoogeographic patterns of animal taxa. Some animals have migrated to the Southern Ocean shelf (polar emergence).
We also have evidence that lots of families migrated and colonized over millions of years from the shelf into the deep sea (polar submergence).
One of the most astounding findings was the remarkable diversity seen in the forams and especially the fact that the species occur bipolarly, both in the Southern Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean.
Interestingly, we also found that the forams found at the North Pole and the South Pole are genetically, the same species
It is for the first time the DNA of the Southern Ocean's deep-sea species have been examined.
Even more surprising, was the discovery of a much stronger gene flow in foraminifera from the Antarctic to the Arctic, but not vice versa. That's because deep Antarctic water flows northward, supplying much of the deep water in other world oceans.
This supports the idea that the bottom water may serve as Antarctic diversity pump of early life stages to more northern areas with the ocean currents.
If this could happen also for other animals that have been reproduced by larvae, then in this respect, the Southern Ocean deep sea may really be a cradle of life for other areas.
Do you have some new theories to share in evolutionary biology?
We will definitely do more evolutionary biology. What we have studied is the morphology of different species, especially among the isopod crustaceans. What we have tried to do is to identify whether they are morphologic species or the so called cryptic species.
Michael Raupach did the molecular work in the isopod crustaceans. Cryptic species are those species that could not be identified with morphological methods.
Raupach could document that some of our more frequently occurring species bear several cryptic species, documenting that our biodiversity estimates are rather under- than overestimations.
Besides population genetics, we will also have to understand phylogenetic relationships between closely related species. For some of these questions we will need more material. Very often, we find rare species. For example, among the isopods we found 52% of the species were rare. We really need to find more of the key species for our analyses. We don't know if our discovery is just a single time. It's really difficult. We don't know whether we will make a discovery like this again soon or may be not for the next 20 years.
Tell us about the carnivorous sponges, isopods and the roundworms that you and your team have discovered?
Carnivorous s
ponges were for us, quite striking animals. I had never seen them before. Carnivorous sponges were known in the deep sea like the Mediterranean but they have never been sampled in the Southern Ocean deep sea before. We found 7-8 new species of carnivores. They have some sort of glue. They can keep prey animals, like little copepods close to their tissues and then digest them. In that respect, I was astonished because I did not expect sponges to be predatory because they are filter feeders. That was quite interesting.
Within the isopods, I was absolutely astonished by the high biodiversity. In the northern hemisphere starting from the tropics to the pole, there is a decrease in species numbers, as has been published in two papers in 1993 in Nature by Rex et al. and Porre and Wilson..
Isopod Ceratoserolis 
If you go further north, the numbers of different species increase. We expected that the numbers of species we would find in the deep sea would be much lesser.
Isopoda euricopinae
We found a completely different picture. We found a very high biodiversity. For example, among the isopods alone, we found 674 new species compared to 371 species known on the shelf. This compares to more than a century of research done in the Antarctic continent. I found this amazing.
How did you feel when you discovered that the Weddell Sea has more than 700 species? Did all of you have a big party celebrating the discovery?
Well, it's difficult to say. Not really. When we were on board, we worked very hard. Being on board Polarstern costs 50 000 Euros a day. It's very expensive. On board we didn't have that facility for parties. We had scientists coming from Vladivostok, Australia....
We never really had a special day when we said we would stop. We never really could celebrate something special. What we did of course was when we had a workshop at Southampton, we managed to get quite a big group during the last deep sea symposium. We had a nice celebration. We had a party in a restaurant.
We are looking forward to go on to the next deep sea Symposium. We just hope to be able to report more results from ANDEEP. Between November 2007and February 2008, we will go on another expedition.
We would like to understand a little more. We want to understand the coupling between atmospheric, pelagic and benthic processes. Moreover, we would like to understand the role of the key species we have already identified during ANDEEP in the food web and like to answer questions like: What do they feed on? Who feeds them? Why do we find so many rare species?
Evidence is emerging that Southern Ocean deep-water faunas are linked to both adjacent shelf and other ocean basin assemblages. This linkage is complex and varies between taxa. Even though we are only beginning to understand the patterns and scale of Southern Ocean biodiversity, we now want to understand some forces that drive biodiversity and biogeographic patterns. We want to understand the function of biodiversity, the role of rare and abundant species.
ANDEEP-SYSTCO (ANtarctic benthicDEEP-sea biodiversity: colonisation history and recent community patterns - SYSTem COupling) is a programme which builds on the ANDEEP results and is designed to study processes in different realms of the biosphere in Antarctica and uncover how these systems are linked to each other (atmospheric-pelagic-benthic coupling processes). SYSTCO will help to understand the role of the Southern Ocean in global energy budgets, climate change, and the maintenance of the diversity of marine life on the Blue Planet.
What do you predict will be the effects of climate change on the biodiversity of the species in the Southern Ocean deep sea?
This is a question that's not possible to answer because we don't know much. We have examined 1 33 000 square meters of the Southern Ocean bottom. The Southern Ocean deep sea has about 29 Million square kilometers of deep sea floor. But what I am sure is that if there's climate change, it will also influence life in the deep sea. If the ice melts, the water get mixed with fresh water, there will be an enormous physiological stress on the animals. It will have an impact on the key stone species. It may be that some of the rare species will face a problem. It's really difficult to say what will happen but something will happen.
Tell us, are there books on Southern Ocean deep sea research available? Which are your favorite books in your field?
I am a Professor at the University of Hamburg and I teach students zoogeography, biogeography, deep sea biology, ecology... During my talks, I tell them a little about my research and I also recommend books. The book on Deep Sea Biology by John D Gage and P.A. Taylor is a special favorite of mine.
We contribute to SCAR- EBA and will deliver our data also to SCAR MarBIN, a metadata base for Antarctic Research.
We have published one special volume in Deep-Sea Research II in 2004, and we are just completing another volume in this journal with articles ranging from sedimentology to phylogeny, ecology, etc.
May be after a couple of years and more experience, we will also be able to write books with a lot of photographs that are suited for a much wider audience.
We will all be waiting for your books. Would you consider having a database and online picture gallery?
That would of course be a fantastic and brilliant idea but at the moment it's impossible. We have some beautiful pictures which we contribute to SCAR-MarBIN.
Brigitte Ebbe is responsible for the education and outreach of the CeDAMar CoML project and can tell you more about illustrations and photographs.
Nuculanid seitlich
What about the colors? Were any of the species colorful?
They are usually not colorful at all. It's dark down there. It doesn't ma
ke sense to be colorful.
Most of them are white, brown, gray, mud colored. Some of the isopods have a yellowish coloration and some of the bivalves too are yellow.
Cylindrarcturus is a good example of a species we found with eyes
Would you please describe some of the species which had eyes?
In some of the species which had eyes, the eyes are vestigial. Some of the species that migrated from the shelf have vestigial eyes.
Those species that originated in the deep sea are blind. They don't have eyes at all.
What's your advice to young people?
I tell the young people that they must do what their heart tells them. If they love their work they will be good and have a chance to find a job. If they regard biology as a job they will never find one...
Would you like to tell us about your family? And how you like to spend your free time?
I live here with my boyfriend Thomas Walter. I really enjoy reading novels and listening to music. I enjoy reading in English and German. I also enjoy reading the assignments written by the students. …and I love diving and the life in the ocean.
Thomas Walter and Angelika Brandt on their roof terrece in Bremen
In this picture, you can see Martina Padberg, my sister, her son Carl Lorenz, my mother Annemarie Brandt, my father Karl Brandt and me.
My sister works in a bank. At the moment, she does not work. My sister is married and has a nephew. I like having the child around. She stays at home and looks after her child. Her husband is an economist just like my friend who is also an economist. My sister stays in Paderborn and my parents stay in Minden.
It must have been so hectic to complete such a huge amount of research work in such a short time, isn’t it? How did you and your team handle the stress?
I have a colleague Marina Malyutina who is an absolute fan of yoga. She gave yoga lessons everyday in the afternoon on board of the RV Polarstern. When we were on board, she would conduct sessions on yoga in the Blue Saloon. We would go in the afternoon and do some stretching and relaxation sessions. May be it really helped people on board.
Thank you very much, Professor Angelika Brandt for sparing your time to give us valuable insights into deep sea research and fascinating glimpses of life at the floor of the Weddell sea.
Photo credits : Prof Dr. Angelika Brandt and members of the ANDEEP Team
