Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctic said on Tuesday they collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms from the murky depths. Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the southern ocean collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface. Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called "gigantism" that scientists still don't fully understand. Voyage leader Dr. Martin Riddle said during twenty days of actual sampling, they collected many samples of marine life, up to twenty-five percent of them previously unknown.

We saw giant worms, giant crustaceans, giant sea spiders, glass-like tunicates, enormously diverse areas in some places, in other places things scraped bare and barren by iceberg/ scour. So huge diversity of life, very colorful, very rich, far exceeding any of our expectations.

They had, they had fins in various places. They had funny dangly bits around their mouths. They, most of all were working on the bottom, so they were all bottom dwellers. So they were all evolved in different ways to live, to hang on the seabed in the dark, so many of them had very large eyes, so that what they are gonna use them for there where there's no life? I couldn't tell you. But yeah, they are very strange-looking fish.

The specimens have been sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and DNA studies. The expedition was part of an ambitious international effort to map life forms in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the "Southern Ocean''. Scientists are studying the impact of climate change and monitoring how increased ocean acidification affects coral gardens. Increased acidification will make it harder for marine organisms to grow and sustain calcium carbonate skeletons. Scientists are planning a follow-up expedition in ten years to examine the effects of climate changes on the environment.