For the first time since our ancestors first crawled out of the ocean onto dry land, mankind is returning to the sea to discover everything we left behind.
More than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries are engaged in the most comprehensive census of marine life ever conducted, a 10-year, $650-million effort to identify and catalog every species that lives in the world’s oceans, from the smallest microbes to the largest fish and marine mammals.
The ultimate goal of the census is to “assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life,” according to the Census of Marine Life web site. In other words, scientists want to know not only how many different species live in the ocean, but where they live, how far they travel, and how many individuals of each species exist.
What scientists are learning is revolutionizing their ideas of how the world works, what goes on beneath the surface of the sea, and the ocean’s fundamental role in life on Earth.
The rate of movement and migration alone is far beyond any previous estimates. Using new tracking tools, census scientists have traced bluefin tuna migrating between the Western United States and Japan as many as three times in a single year, white sharks swimming back and forth continually between Australia and South Africa, and sea turtles circumnavigating the Pacific. Some sea birds are equally restless: one gray-headed albatross flew around the world in just 46 days.
When the Census of Marine Life is released in 2010 as an online encyclopedia, it will contain photos and detailed information about hundreds of thousands of ocean species, thousands of them never before seen and at least one shrimp species that scientists thought had been extinct for 50 million years. Even then, however, scientists estimate that as many as a million more marine species will remain undiscovered.
Most of what we know about the ocean is between the surface and depths of approximately 1,000 feet. The majority of the ocean is much deeper, and we are only beginning to get a glimpse of the variety of life that exists at those depths. Scientists who have studied the deep-sea findings that have been part of the census say that the deepest parts of the ocean may contain the greatest diversity of life on Earth.
For the Census of Marine Life, scientists are using the most advanced technology and techniques available, including deep-sea robots, laser-based radar and highly sensitive sonar that can track fish 90 miles away. Since the project began in 2000, census teams have made approximately 400 voyages of discovery.
Using new DNA sequencing techniques, scientists can identify each species with great precision and determine when multiple names have been given to the same species. So far, researchers have used DNA analysis to eliminate more than 50,000 aliases for various species, the worst case being a breadcrumb sponge that previously had 56 different names worldwide.
Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist and a co-founder of the Census of Marine Life, beautifully summed up the scientists’ view of their work and discoveries in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: “Though the science is crucial, in the end the beauty of the ocean is what inspires us. Sometimes I think it was a terrible mistake to crawl out onto the land."
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