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Researchers working in Antarctica have made an unexpected discovery: colonies of stationary animals – likely sponges and related creatures – attached to a boulder deep under the ice, NBC reports. Geologists who drilled their way through the 3,000-meter-thick ice of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf to take sediment samples from the ocean floor walked into the rock and sent a camera down. “It was a real surprise to see these animals there,” Huw Griffiths, a marine biologist and lead author of the new study documenting the find, told CNN. “It’s amazing,” he told NBC, “because no one has ever seen it before.” In the past, tiny mobile creatures – things like fish, worms, jellyfish, and crustaceans – have been found far beneath the ice, the Guardian notes. But stationary filter feeders don’t have that.
Many scientists believed this was due to the hostile environment created by total darkness, a lack of food resources, and freezing temperatures. Sponges and other filter feeders survive by feeding on floating material from plants and animals. The boulder where the animals reside is located about 150 miles from the open sea. Based on the current, the food they ingest could come from more than 900 miles away, the researchers say. “It was a real shock to find them there, a really good shock, but we can’t do DNA tests, we can’t find out what they ate or how old they are. We don’t even know if they are new species, but they certainly live in a place where we wouldn’t expect them to live, ”Griffiths told the Guardian(Read more stories about Antarctica.)