Marine life is thriving on unexploded Nazi bombs sitting at the bottom of a German bay, a submersible has discovered, even capturing footage of starfishes creeping across a huge chunk of TNT.
The discovery, which was revealed in a study published Thursday, was “one of those rare but remarkable eureka moments,” marine biologist Andrey Vedenin told AFP.
The waters off Germany’s coast are estimated to be littered with 1.6 million tons of unexploded munitions left behind from both world wars.
In October last year, a team of German scientists went to a previously uncharted dump site in the Baltic Sea’s Luebeck Bay and sent an unmanned submersible 20 meters down to the seafloor.
They were surprised when footage from the sub revealed 10 Nazi-era cruise missiles. Then they were stunned when they saw animals covering the surface of the bombs.
There were roughly 40,000 animals per square meter — mostly marine worms — living on the munitions, the scientists wrote in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
This handout photograph provided by DeepSea Monitoring Group and taken on October 2024 with an unmanned submersible shows starfish (Asterias rubens) on top of a chunk of TNT, part of an unexploded Nazi-era cruise missile, at the bottom Luebeck Bay in the German waters of the Baltic Sea. / Credit: ANDREY VEDENIN/DeepSea Monitoring Group/AFP via Getty Images
“Despite the potential negative effects of the toxic munition compounds, published underwater images show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels, and other epifauna on the munition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs, and wooden crates,” the study concludes.
They also counted three species of fish, a crab, sea anemones, a jellyfish relative called hydroids and plenty of starfishes.
While animals covered the hard casing of the bombs, they mostly avoided the yellow explosive material — except for one instance.
The researchers were baffled to see that more than 40 starfishes had piled on to an exposed chunk of TNT.
“It looked really weird,” said Vedenin, a scientist at Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky University and the study’s lead author.
Exactly why the starfishes were there was unclear, but Vedenin theorized they could be eating bacterial film collecting on the corroding TNT.
Life on deadly weapons
The explosive chemicals are highly toxic, but the animals appeared to have found a way to live near it.
Other than the death-wish starfishes, they did not seem to be behaving strangely.
“The crabs were just sitting and picking something with their claws,” Vedenin said.
To find out what kind of bombs they were dealing with, he went online and found a manual from the Nazi air force Luftwaffe describing how to handle and store V-1 flying bombs. The cruise missile exactly matched the 10 bombs from the footage.
Vedenin said “there is some irony” in the discovery that these “things that are meant to kill everything are now attracting so much life.”
This image provided by Andrey Vedenin shows sea creatures living on dumped World War II explosives in the Baltic Sea. / Credit: Andrey Vedenin / AP
He compared it to how animals such as deer now thrive in radioactive areas abandoned by humans near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Hard surfaces on the seafloor are important for marine life that want more than mud and sand.
Animals once flocked to huge boulders that littered the Baltic Sea, however humans removed the stones to build infrastructure such as roads at the start of the 20th century.
So when the Nazi bombs are eventually cleared from the bay, the researchers called for more stones — or concrete structures — to be put in place to continue supporting the sea life.
The scientists also plan to return to the spot next month to set up a time-lapse camera to watch what the starfishes do next.
Marine life also thriving in shipwrecks
It’s the latest example of wildlife flourishing in polluted sites. Previous research has shown shipwrecks and former weapons complexes teeming with biodiversity.
Studies like these are a testament to how nature takes advantage of human leftovers, flipping the script to survive, said marine conservation biologist David Johnston with Duke University. He recently mapped sunken World War I ships that have become habitats for wildlife along the Potomac River in Maryland.
“I think it’s a really cool testimony to the strength of life,” Johnston told the Associated Press.
A 2023 paper published in BioScience found that shipwrecks provide important ecological resources for a wide variety of organisms, from tiny microbes to large marine creatures.
“Small fish and mobile crustaceans often find shelter in the crevices of the sunken material, and larger baitfish and predators use shipwrecks as feeding grounds and rest stops as they swim from one place to another,” according to NOAA, which helped conduct the study.
This year, a cargo ship lying at the bottom of the sea off the Belgian coast has been filled with a stash of rare flat oysters in a bid to help boost other marine species.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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