Ammon News - A study of octopus DNA may have solved an enduring mystery about when the rapidly melting West Antarctic ice sheet last collapsed, unlocking valuable information about how much future sea levels may rise in a warming climate.

The innovative research focused on the genetic history of the Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti), which lives on the seafloor across the Antarctic, and what it could reveal about the geology of the region over time.

Tracing past encounters across the species’ various populations suggested the most recent collapse of the ice sheet occurred more than 100,000 years ago during a period known as the Last Interglacial — something geoscientists suspected but had not been able to confirm definitively, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

“This project was exciting because it offers a brand-new perspective to solve a long-standing question in the geoscience community,” said lead study author Sally Lau, a postdoctoral research fellow at James Cook University in Australia.

“DNA of living animals today contains all the information about their ancestors (in the) past, so it’s like a time capsule,” she said.

The research team arrived at its findings by sequencing the DNA of 96 Turquet’s octopuses that had been collected by institutions around the world and through fishing bycatch over the years. The oldest samples dated to the 1990s, but when sequenced, their genes provided what was essentially a detailed family tree going back millions of years.


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