Abstract
Abstract Antarctica harbours some of the most isolated and extreme environments on Earth, concealing a largely unexplored and unique component of the global animal virosphere. To understand the diversity and evolutionary histories of viruses in these polar species, we determined the viromes of gill metatranscriptomes from 11 Antarctic fish species with 248 samples collected from the Ross Sea region spanning the Perciformes, Gadiformes, and Scorpaeniformes orders. The continent’s shift southward and cooling temperatures >20 million years ago led to a reduction in biodiversity and subsequent radiation of some marine fauna, such as the notothenioid fishes. Despite decreased host species richness in polar regions, we revealed a surprisingly complex virome diversity in Ross Sea fish, with the types and numbers of viruses per host species and individuals sampled comparable to that of fish in warmer marine environments with higher host community diversity. We also observed a higher number of closely related viruses likely representing instances of recent and historic host-switching events among the Perciformes (all notothenioids) than in the Gadiformes, suggesting that rapid speciation events within this order generated closely related host species with few genetic barriers to cross-species transmission. Additionally, we identified novel genomic variation in an arenavirus with a split nucleoprotein sequence containing a stable helical structure, indicating potential adaptation of viral proteins to extreme temperatures. These findings enhance our understanding of virus evolution and virus-host interactions in response to environmental shifts, especially in less diverse ecosystems that are more vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic and climate changes.