by The marine life blooms on non -depleted Nazi bombs that are on the bottom of a German bay, has discovered a immersion, even capturing images of starfishes that crawl over a huge piece of TNT.
The discovery, which was unveiled in a study published Thursday, was “one of those rare but remarkable Eureka moments,” Marine biologist Andrey Vedenin told AFP.
The waters off the coast of Germany are estimated to be blocked by 1.6 million tonnes of non -ploped ammunition from both world wars.
In October last year, a team of German scientists went to a previously unknown dump site in the Luebeck Bay of the Baltic Sea and sent an unmanned dipper 20 meters away to the seabed.
They were surprised when images from the sub 10 cruise missiles of the Nazi era revealed. Then they were stunned when they saw animals that covered the surface of the bombs.
There were around 40,000 animals per square meter – mostly marine worms – alive on the ammunition, the scientists wrote in the magazine Communications Earth & Environment.
This hand-out photo of the Deepsea Monitoring Group and taken on October 2024 with an unmanned immersion shows with Zeester (Asterias Rubens) on top of a part of TNT, part of a non-fledged cruise rocket of the Nazi era, on the lower Luebeck Bay in the German water of the Baltic Sea. /Credit: Andrey Vedenin/Deepsea Monitoring Group/AFP via Getty Images
“Despite the potential negative effects of the poisonous ammunition connections, underwater images published populations of algae, hydroids, mussels and other epifauna on the ammunition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs and wooden crates,” concludes the study.
They also had three types of fish, a crab, sea anemones, a jellyfish family member called hydroids and many starfish.
While animals covered the hard housing of the bombs, they usually avoided the yellow explosive material – except one example.
The researchers were stunned to see that more than 40 starfish were piled up on a exposed part of TNT.
“It looked really strange,” said Vedenin, a scientist at the German Carl von Ossietzky University and the main author of the study.
Exactly why the Zeester was there was unclear, but theoretized that they could eat bacterial films that collect on the corrodating TNT.
Living on fatal weapons
The explosive chemicals are very toxic, but the animals seemed to have found a way to live close by.
Apart from the death whish starfish, they did not seem to behave strangely.
“The crabs were just and chose something with their claws,” said Vedenin.
To find out what kind of bombs they were dealing with, he went online and found a manual of the Nazi air power Luftwaffe that describes how to go and save V-1 flying bombs. The cruise rocket corresponded exactly to the 10 bombs of the images.
Venin said, “There is some irony” in the discovery that “things that are meant to kill everything now draw so much life.”
This image of Andrey Vedenin shows marine animals that live on dumped World War explosives in the Baltic Sea. / Credit: Andrey Vedenin / AP
He compared it with how animals such as deer now thrive in radioactive areas that have been abandoned by people near the place of the Nuclear Ramp of Chernobyl.
Hard surfaces on the seabed are important for life at sea that want more than mud and sand.
Animals once flowed to huge boulders that littered the Baltic Sea, but people removed the stones to build infrastructure, such as roads at the beginning of the 20th century.
So when the Nazi bombs are eventually released from the bay, the researchers called for more stones – or concrete structures – to continue to support marine life.
The scientists are also planning to return to the place next month to set up a time-lapse camera to see what the starfish do next.
Marine Life also blooms in shipwrecks
It is the latest example of flourishing animals in the wild at polluted locations. Previous research has shown that shipwrecks and former arms complexes are crawling of biodiversity.
Studies like this are proof of how nature benefits from human leftovers, turning the script to survive, said Marine preservation biologist David Johnston with Duke University. He recently mapped sunken ships from the First World War that have become habitats for wildlife animals along the Potomac River in Maryland.
“I think it’s really a cool testimony of the power of life,” Johnston told The Associated Press.
A paper from 2023 published in Bioscience showed that shipwrecks offer important ecological sources for a wide range of organisms, from small microbes to large marine creatures.
“Small fish and mobile crustaceans often find shelter in the cracks of the sunken material, and larger baitfish and predators use shipwrecks and resting plots while swimming from one place to another,” according to Noaa, which helped to perform the study.
This year is a cargo ship that is on the bottom of the Sea off the Belgian coast Is filled with a supply of rare flat oysters in an attempt to stimulate other marine species.
The Associated Press has contributed to this report.
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