As Germany demilitarized after World War II, it dumped massive amounts of its leftover munitions into the Baltic Sea. A recent study has found that some of those submerged weapons, which are still releasing toxic compounds, now host more marine organisms than the sediments around them. In October 2024, researchers used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) equipped with two camera systems to investigate a munition dumpsite located in the northern part of Lübeck Bay, in the southwest of the Baltic Sea. On the seafloor, scattered across the fine mud sediment, they found large metal cylinders that they identified as discarded warheads from Fieseler Fi103 cruise missiles used by Nazi Germany during the war. To see what organisms lived at the site, the researchers recorded videos using the ROV, and collected biological and sediment samples from both the military debris and the surrounding sediment. They identified eight species in the ROV videos, including snails, sea anemones, worms, starfishes, crabs, and fish including Atlantic cod, black goby and flounder. The most abundant species were Polydora ciliata worms and Metridium dianthus sea anemones. The missile debris supported more organisms overall — 43,184 individuals per square meter (4,013 individuals per square foot) — compared to the surrounding sediment that had 8,213 individuals/m2 (763 individuals/ft2). “We were prepared to see significantly lower numbers of all kinds of animals. But it turned out the opposite,” study author Andrey Vedenin, from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany, told ABC news. Examples of the species identified from the ROV videos.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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