Adaptation of Arctic and Antarctic ice metazoa to their habitat

Sea ice is a unique habitat in polar seas. A diverse assemblage of plants and animals lives in its interior parts and at the ice-water interface. Their distribution is to a large extent controlled by abiotic parameters such as light, salinity and space, as well as food availability. In both the Arctic and Antarctic, the highest metazoan concentrations occur mostly in the bottom centimetres of the sea ice. Dominant metazoans are nematodes, turbellarians, rotifers and crustaceans. The ice-water interface itself houses in addition to endemic amphipods migrants from both the ice and the pelagic realm. To survive with the environmental conditions of the sea ice habitat, the ice biota is adapted, specifically to seasonal salinity variations from below 5 to above 60 PSU. Sea ice metazoans feed mainly on the algae growing within the sea ice. The loss of habitat during ice melt periods can lead to substantial sedimentation of ice fauna to the sea floor, where it might act as food source for the benthos.