The Heated Settlement Panels

What heated settlement panels did

The heated panels project tested how marine life responds to warmer oceans. The focus was on the waters of the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth. This work was part of British Antarctic Survey’s Grand Challenge: Polar Change.

Scientists and the Antarctic Marine Engineering Team (AME) developed heated settlement panels. A small electric heater warmed the underside of each panel. This raised the water above by 1–2°C, simulating future ocean temperatures.

Small encrusting animals settled on the panels and stayed in place. Scientists monitored how fast they grew and how they competed for space under different temperatures.

These communities, also called biofouling, included bryozoans and calcareous tube-dwelling polychaetes. They are key colonisers in shallow marine environments and influence how ecosystems develop. They also have economic importance. In 2008, biofouling cost $15 billion for desalination plants and power stations, and $7 billion for shipping worldwide.

Why this mattered

The project showed how biofouling communities might change as oceans warm. Early colonisers affect how other species grow, so these results helped predict wider ecosystem changes.

The Antarctic Peninsula is warming quickly. Understanding how these animals grew, survived, and competed under warmer conditions gave scientists valuable insights into future biodiversity.

How the project worked

• Panel design: Heated panels had electric elements to raise water temperature by 1–2°C.
• Deployment: In 2014, panels were placed in waters near Rothera Research Station.

• Monitoring: SCUBA divers took high resolution photos at 2-3 month intervals over two years.

• Analysis: Scientists studied the images to see how organisms settled, grew, and competed under warming conditions.

Science objectives

The project aimed to:

• test how biofouling communities respond to warmer seawater
• monitor growth and survival of species under warming
• understand how competition for space changes with temperature
• predict climate change impacts on Antarctic shallow marine ecosystems

Heated panels like these have now been deployed in New Zealand, Bangor, California, Newcastle and Scotland. There are currently plans to deploy them in Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica and on the Great Barrier Reef, and there is a network planning to deploy them in Norway, Denmark and the Arctic as noted in this article.

Who was involved

The project was led by British Antarctic Survey scientists working with the Antarctic Marine Engineering Team (AME). Divers at Rothera Research Station deployed and monitored the panels.

This project was funded by NERC: reference NE/J007501/1 “Effects of warming on recruitment and marine benthic community development in Antarctica”

The aims of this project are to:

1. Identify which species grow on these settlement panels
2. Determine how their growth rates are affected by different temperatures: do they grow better or worse on the warmer panels?
3. Analyse the community composition at the different temperatures; does it change?
4. Identify how temperature affects competition between the different species

This project is based at Rothera operating out of the Bonner Laboratory, but Leyre Villota-Nieva, the PhD student associated with the project is also trialing the panels in Bangor, UK studing seasonal responses in the Menai Straits.

Research collaborators

The PhD associated with this project is co-supervised by Dr Andrew Davies at Bangor University

Collaboration on biofilm metagenomics with Dr Ben Temperton at the University of Exeter

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