Antarctica, LiveScience reveals, isn’t the wasteland it appears. In fact, it has more species than the Galapagos Islands:
A team of 23 scientists from five research institutes, including team members from the British Antarctic Survey, undertook the first comprehensive inventory of sea and land animals around the South Orkney Islands, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. …
The inventory turned up sea urchins, free-swimming worms, crustaceans and mollusks, mites and birds, including five new species (of bryozoans, more commonly known as sea moss, and isopods, the marine equivalents of wood-lice) to science.
…The team concluded there are more than 1,224 species in total at this Antarctic locale. Of these, nearly a third were new to the area, such as three octopuses, four snails, five sea urchins, and one sea star, to name a few.
Isopods!