This Week in Science: Ocean Census and New Species

rimrocker · Oct 4, 2010

What we don't know about our planet is still a lot... a 10 year study of part of the oceans yields 6,000 new species. Remarkable.

Global Census of Marine Life reveals thousands of new species, other discoveries

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 4, 2010; 8:49 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/04/AR2010100401989_pf.html

A lone deep-sea snail living within a hydrothermal vent. The migratory tracks of great white sharks crossing ocean basins. Audio recordings of schools of fish the size of Manhattan, swimming in concert.

These are just a handful of the discoveries that came out of the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project that finished Monday. Encompassing more than 2,700 scientists from 80 nations and territories across the world, the census sought to answer a basic but daunting question. In the words of its scientific steering committee chairman Ian Poiner: "What did live in the ocean, what does live in the ocean and what will live in the ocean?"

Ten years after the study was launched, much of the sea remains unknown. At its start only 5 percent of the ocean had been seriously explored, and even now, there are no observations for 20 percent of the sea, while more than half of the ocean has only been subject to minimal exploration.

Still, the project has, in the words of its co-founder Jesse Ausubel, "defined what is unknown" about the ocean, and shed light on how it functions. "The oceans are richer than we imagined, more connected than we imagined, and they're more altered," said Ausubel, program director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the census's vice president.

The $650 million initiative, $75 million of which came from the Sloan Foundation, launched 570 expeditions that journeyed from Antarctica to the tropics. Ranking as one of the world's largest scientific collaborations ever, it produced more 2,600 academic papers and collected 30 million observations of 120,000 species. Researchers have identified potentially 6,000 new species in the course of the project, 1,200 of which have been formally described.

When the idea of the census first surfaced in the late 1990s, however, even some experienced researchers were intimidated at the prospect of venturing into uncharted territory. Ausubel and Rutgers University's Fred Grassle approached Stanford University marine biologist Barbara Block about coordinating a tagging program in the Pacific Ocean to track where and how key creatures moved underwater. Block, who had tagged animals in the Atlantic, said she walked away from the conversation "a little shell-shocked. I had never worked in the Pacific in a big way."

But as she contemplated it one November day while looking out at the Pacific, Block realized why she needed to do it: "It was discovery."

Tagging of Pacific Predators, the operation that arose from that conversation, is the largest tracking effort targeting marine animals on the globe. Researchers have more than 4,300 electronic tags to study 23 species' position as well as ocean temperature, pressure, light and salinity, retrieving a billion records from the sea.

Those findings, Block said, should help ensure that institutions and governments are willing to fund this kind of research even now that the census is over.

"The same technology that drives our computers, drives our phones and drives our satellite technology can be used to observe and manage our marine resources, our biological resources," she said. "This deep ocean can be studied and can be tracked."

Sophisticated tracking has provided some of the most stunning discoveries about the sea over the past decade. A single bluefin tuna crosses the north Atlantic over the course of two years, swimming past the Virginia and Maryland coasts. Loggerhead turtles move through those same waters, but they follow the North Atlantic gyre not just along the East Coast but to Africa and then the Caribbean.

Virginia Institute of Marine Science professor Tracey Sutton used funds from the census and the National Science Foundation to spearhead the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Ecosystem Project, in which scientists from 16 nations studied deep-sea animals along the underwater mountain range that runs from Iceland to the Azores.

The project launched three separate cruises - in 2003, 2004, and 2009 - to sample organisms living as deep as 9,000 feet below the surface and to monitor the flow of energy through the North Atlantic ecosystem. "Understanding the dynamics of deep-sea food webs is essential for scientific understanding and management of earth's largest ecosystem," said Sutton, who will attend the London news conference Monday marking the end of the census.

New acoustic techniques have also allowed census scientists to measure the abundance, and sometimes even the composition of marine life. Paul Snelgrove, who leads the census's Synthesis Group, said researchers were able to use sound waves that went out and bounced back to determine that schools of fish the size of Manhattan were congregating in the Gulf of Maine.

"This was a major leap forward in terms of our knowledge," Snelgrove said.

That same technology helped chronicle the vertical migration of tens of thousands of tons of zooplankton along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, who move up to feed at night and then return to the depths during the day. "It's really a commute," said Ausubel, noting the distance the zooplankton travel during peak times in the summer is four times the height of the Empire State Building.

On a practical level, the project has established a baseline for key areas in the sea, including parts of the Gulf of Mexico damaged by this year's massive oil spill. As of 2009 researchers had identified 8,332 forms of life in the part of the gulf closest to the spill, providing authorities with what Ausubel called "a checklist" from which they can compare a year or two from now.

In more remote areas, like the Clarion Clipperton Fracture in the central Pacific, the mapping researchers have done through the census is now helping the International Seabed Authority craft rules for future deep sea mining.

One of the most surprising and esoteric discoveries, on the other hand, came from studying the ocean's tiniest residents: microbes. According to Snelgrove, "There may be as many as a billion kinds of microbes. That's kind of mind boggling. What are they doing? If we see shifts from one to another, does it matter? I suspect it does."

This kind of research, said House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, will matter in the years to come.

"Energy, clean water and food is what people are going to start fighting wars over," Gordon said in an interview. "We need our oceans to be as productive as ever."
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Xerobull · Oct 4, 2010

Even more stuff for the Japanese to eat!

rhadamanthus · Oct 4, 2010

Good, more things we can fish to extinction.

Depressio · Oct 4, 2010

This thread needs more freaky pictures of deep-water life. You know, the funky-looking kind that lives below where light can penetrate.

BigSherv · Oct 4, 2010

I just read about a whale fall. I had never heard of it before. Who knew the carcass of a dead whale would serve as food for decades after the animal dies.

Invisible Fan · Oct 4, 2010

Blue Planet...highly recommended.

<object width="480" height="360"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/xsj0c?additionalInfos=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/xsj0c?additionalInfos=0" width="480" height="360" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></embed></object><br /><b><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsj0c_blue-planet-deep-sea-1_animals">Blue Planet-Deep Sea 1</a></b>

Xerobull said:

Even more stuff for the Japanese to eat!
Click to expand...

Thinking the same thing.

The more illegal it is, the tastier it gets!

SwoLy-D · Oct 4, 2010

NO. WAY.

Fyreball · Oct 4, 2010

In the deep sea, ocean takes a bite out of YOU!

rocketsjudoka · Oct 4, 2010

Very cool but also sad that a lot of the ocean ecosystems might die out before we even have a chance to understand them.

rimrocker · Oct 4, 2010

TSchmal said:

This thread needs more freaky pictures of deep-water life. You know, the funky-looking kind that lives below where light can penetrate.
Click to expand...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/10/04/GA2010100402533.html?hpid=artslot

Series of photos with odd things, including a Vampire Squid.

deadlybulb · Oct 5, 2010

Xerobull said:

Even more stuff for the Japanese to eat!
Click to expand...

"F you, Whare!!!!"

"F you, Dorphin!!!"

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This Week in Science: Ocean Census and New Species

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Xerobull ...and I'm all out of bubblegum

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