World's Largest Fish Nesting Ground With 60 Million Nests Discovered Under Antarctic Ice (Pics & Video)

The unexpected find is way larger than any other known colony of fish nests found so far. The fact that we know less about the ocean floor than we do about the surface of the Moon doesn’t make this incredible find any less surprising. Five hundred meters below the ice covering the south of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a research team recently discovered the world’s largest fish breeding site known to date.

"The idea that such a huge breeding area of icefish in the Weddell Sea was previously undiscovered is totally fascinating," said Purser, lead author of the study, in a statement. Purser's enthusiastic statement is easy to understand when you realize that the AWI has been researching this particular stretch of the Weddell Sea for the past 40 years, but so far only small clusters of icefish breeding sites were found. So, why exactly here? The team used oceanographic and biological data to establish that the vast breeding site coincided with an inflow of warmer deep water from the Weddell Sea onto the nesting ground shelf.