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The latest issue of Discovery Magazine contained a brief article (in its “Breakthroughs” section) about the hotheaded naked ice borer, a fascinating new Antarctic species recently found by wildlife biologist Dr. A. Pazzo.

These bizarre creatures were each about half a foot long, very light, and had a bony plate attached to their head that could become burning hot, allowing them to bore tunnels through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins. Packs of them would melt the ice beneath a penguin causing it to sink into the slush, at which point the borers would surround the hapless creature and consume it.

Dr. Pazzo, the article explained, discovered the borers by chance as a result of their predatory nature. While studying a group of penguins, she noticed one frightened member of the group rapidly sinking into the ice. When she pulled the hapless creature out of the fast-growing slush pool, she found a host of small creatures attached to it. These creatures turned out to be Hotheaded Ice Borers.

After researching this fascinating new species, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of the Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. “To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin,“ the article quoted her as saying.

EXTRACTED FROM THE APRIL DISCOVERY MAGAZINE :

April Pazzo was about to call it a day when she noticed that the penquins she was observing seemed strangely agitated. Pazzo, a wildlife biologist, was in Antarctica studying penguins at a remote, poorly explored area along the coast of the Ross Sea. “I was getting ready to release a penguin I had tagged when I heard a lot of squawking,“ says Pazzo. “When I looked up, the whole flock had sort of stampeded. They were waddling away faster than I’d ever seen them move.“

Pazzo waded through the panicked birds to find out what was wrong. She found one penguin that hadn’t fled. “It was sinking into the ice as if into quicksand,“ she says. Somehow the ice beneath the bird had melted; the penguin was waist deep in slush. Pazzo tried to help the struggling penguin. She grabbed its wings and pulled. With a heave she freed the bird. But the penguin wasn’t the only thing she hauled from the slush. About a dozen small, hairless pink molelike creatures had clamped their jaws onto the penguin’s lower body. Pazzo managed to capture one of the creatures—the others quickly released their grip and vanished into the slush.

Over the next few months Pazzo caught several of the animals and watched others in the wild. She calls the strange new species hotheaded naked ice borers. “They’re repulsive,“ says Pazzo. Adults are about six inches long, weigh a few ounces, have a very high metabolic rate—their body temperature is 110 degrees—and live in labyrinthine tunnels carved in the ice.

Perhaps their most fascinating feature is a bony plate on their forehead. Innumerable blood vessels line the skin covering the plate. The animals radiate tremendous amounts of body heat through their “hot plates,“ which they use to melt their tunnels in ice and to hunt their favorite prey: penguins.

A pack of ice borers will cluster under a penguin and melt the ice and snow it’s standing on. When the hapless bird sinks into the slush, the ice borers attack, dispatching it with bites of their sharp incisors. They then carve it up and carry its flesh back to their burrows, leaving behind only webbed feet, a beak, and some feathers. “They travel through the ice at surprisingly high speeds,“ says Pazzo, “much faster than a penguin can waddle.“

Pazzo’s discovery may also help solve a long-standing Antarctic mystery: What happened to the heroic polar explorer Phillipe Poisson, who disappeared in Antarctica without a trace in 1837? “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that a big pack of ice borers got him,“ says Pazzo. “I’ve seen what these things do to emporer penguins—it isn’t pretty—and emporers can be as much as four feet tall. Poisson was about 5 foot 6. To the ice borers, he would have looked like a big penguin."

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