Zavodovski Expedition. Terrestrial Biological survey of Zavodovski Island. Team Moss.

A lonely Island somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Zavodovski Island. The northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands. An active volcano and home to largest penguin colony in the world. The extensive ash plains on the South, East and North slopes of the island are spectacularly barren. Any terrestrial vegetation is likely to regularly and repeatedly sand-blasted out of existence.

Geographically, the Islands are well known. In terms of their biodiversity, these islands are a white spot on the map. Zavodovski Island remains virtually unsurveyed. We know hardly anything about how life functions on these islands. We do not know which wildlife, plants, animals or fungi even exist there.

In geological terms, the islands are recent, with ages between one and three million years. An eruption occurred in March 2016 and resulted in ash covering a third of the island: the impacts of this upon the terrestrial communities are undocumented. The South Sandwich Islands are the most data deficient place in the UK Overseas Territories. This is mostly because these islands are so remote and it is very difficult to land.

And yet, here we are, on board the Vinson of Antarctica, ready to set camp and perform the first comprehensive biological survey of Zavodovski Island. The project, funded by DEFRA and the Darwin plus funding scheme, aims to catalogue the biology and feed directly into the government’s management plan of the South Sandwich Islands. We are a team of three biologists. Gemma Glucas - a seabird specialist, John Dickens – a polar biologist and myself, Claudia Colesie – a terrestrial ecologist. My role on this trip is to find any life on land on Zavodovski Island.

My expectations to find life on Zavodovski Island were rather small. But, as with many things on this trip – I will be surprised.

On the first day in camp, we make our way up the steep and very slippery slopes on the western side of the volcano. We are walking for a couple of hours and all I can see is dust, ash and a landscape that resembles the surface of the moon rather than any other landscape on planet earth. If I can find anything here it will be hidden and small - cryptic.

One lifeform that I expect to find here are lichens. These fascinating organisms are a symbiosis between a fungus and algae. Imagine it as the terrestrial equivalent to a coral at sea. Lichens are incredibly tough organisms. They survive conditions in space, or they can be frozen in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -90 degree Celsius. Try that with a dandelion… If anything is alive on this island, it must be a lichen.

After about three hours of searching, there it is - our first lichen. It is a small specimen of a lichen called Acarospra gwynnii, growing in the small cracks of one of the volcanic boulders. A spectacular find for Zavodovski Island – nobody knew that this was here. A very good start for this survey and as the day goes on we find more and more. In total, during the whole of the trip, I find 15 species of lichen. None of them were known to be here before.

Another organism I am looking for is moss. The presence of moss has been described on Zavodovski before, but we are four days into our trip already and I have not seen a single shoot. Finally, on day five, on the way back from the large penguin colony, I cannot believe my eyes. There it is, moss – and a lot of it.

Just a few millimetres thick, these mosses have a phenomenal impact on the environment. They kickstart the environment and ecology of the substrate by holding small soil particles together and form an active layer of life. Some of the moss shows signs of birds collecting it to line their nests. Other than moss and lichen, we also find invertebrates, worms and even a tick, most probably off one of the many penguins, living as animals on Zavodovski Island.

The Island is much more divers than anyone would have expected. Zavodovski Island is alive and it has a functional ecology with species interacting and making a life even in the harshest conditions on this planet.

Claudia Colesie

Terrestrial Ecologist, University of Edinburgh