Post date: Oct 04, 2010 8:35:0 PM
Scientists have completed a 10-year census of marine life, finding thousands of exotic new species in a project that will help assess threats to the oceans ranging from climate change to oil spills.
AT SEA, PHILIPPINES COML - Scientists completed the world's first ocean census on Monday (October 4) and said they had found thousands of new marine species.
The $650 million international census, by 2,700 experts in 80 nations, discovered creatures such as a hairy-clawed "yeti crab", luminous fish in the sunless depths, a shrimp thought extinct in Jurassic times and a 7-metre (23 ft) long squid.
But the researchers reckon most mysteries of the deep are still intact with most creatures dodging the census and still yet to be found.
Researcher Ian Poiner said scientists were surprised by the connectedness of life revealed by the survey.
"We have tunas that move from the West Coast of the US to Japan and back to the West Coast . We have sharks that move from the southern coast of the south-west coast of Australia to South Africa and back. That sort of connectedness we didn't understand. Similarly, we have a connectedness north-south. We have a very small shearwater sea bird that travels from New Zealand to Russia to Alaska to Chile -- 64,000 kilometres in its annual migration," said Poiner, who helped compile the final report
Some negative human impacts were recorded, including overfishing of cod and tuna stocks, hazards from oil and other pollution and impacts of global warming.
"In one year, one percent of the seabed has been impacted physically by bottom trawling, itself quite a small figure, but if you put several years together, even though the fishermen may be go back to the same area, then this can be a large cumulative figure," said David Billett, co-chair of Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems Group.
The census raises the estimate of known marine species bigger than microbes, from worms to blue whales, to nearly 250,000 from 230,000. And it estimates that far more, or 750,000 other species, are still to be discovered.
Scientists said the biggest gaps were in vast unexplored parts of the Arctic, Antarctic and eastern Pacific with much of the ocean depths yet to be explored.
The census itself found more than 6,000 potentially new species, led by new types of crustaceans and molluscs, and made formal descriptions of more than 1,200. Scientists say they hope their work can change the way people think about the oceans and why they are so important.
. Among extremes, scientists found a metre-long tube worm an estimated 600 years old and recorded a sailfish swimming at 110 kph (69 mph).
Among spinoffs, a 2009 review of the Gulf of Mexico found 8,332 species from fish to mammals in the area hit by BP's deep water blowout in April 2010, the worst spill in U.S. history.