A new research, led by Richard Aronson, a professor of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, has found that rising water temperatures off the coast of Antarctica due to global climate change may be putting the weak marine ecosystem against an unpredicted danger, the risk of an invasion of shell-crushing crabs.

A research carried in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday has found that conditions are turning in a way that had indicated an invasion of king crabs on the continental shelf off the western Antarctic Peninsula.

The crabs are known for their habit of breaking open the outer skeletons of animals such as starfish, urchins and mollusks. They feed on the types of soft-bodied organisms living on the shelf and have the ability to cause devastation of the local ecology.

King crabs are located on ocean’s bottom in deep waters worldwide and generally turn up in shallower waters in sub-polar regions. Some of the species like red king crabs are well known for growing into huge sizes, though a number of species are much more modest in size.

They are widely spread throughout across the globe but for millions of years they’ve not been able to venture closer to the Antarctic land mass as the conditions over there are very cold for them.

Generally, king crabs can’t survive in temperatures colder than 1 degree Celsius. Shallow waters present in the Antarctic continental shelf are quite cold as they’re very close to the icy continent.

“Marine communities in shallow water environments in Antarctica look vastly different from marine communities elsewhere in the world,” says study lead author Richard Aronson, head of the department of biological sciences at Florida Institute of Technology.

“If you were to go to a museum of natural history and look at the dioramas of life in the ancient seas, you’d be looking at something that doesn’t look all that hugely different from what you see in Antarctica today,” says Dr. Aronson. “The Antarctic communities are in a sense archaic or retrograde because they don’t have modern predators in them.”

“We know that it’s a dense population and we know that it’s a reproductive population,” he says. The still photographs captured some crabs in what Aronson calls their “copulatory embrace,” as well as some babies and eggs.