Bizarre species amaze scientists doing census on underwater life

Bizarre species amaze scientists doing census on underwater life
Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, November 10, 2008
Scientists meeting in Valencia, Spain on Tuesday will unveil major progress on a census of all marine life, including the discovery of strange new species, including bacteria that form four-metre high mounds, a mammoth mollusc and a "city" of brittle starfish.

There's a sea floor carpet of bugs and spiders the size of dinner plates. And there are also bizarre discoveries, such as rare deepwater snails found living on a dog's skull that had washed out to sea off the Philippines.

The Census of Marine Life - a network of 2,000 researchers from more than 80 nations - is a 10-year attempt to assess the diversity and abundance of ocean life and pressures affecting it.


Millions of brittle stars, likely Ophiacantha rosea, relatives of sea stars and sea cucumbers, colonize the peak of a seamount to feed on particles carried by the swift Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand 2008
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Font:****One of the major findings so far is evidence that most deepsea octopuses in today's oceans evolved from still-living Antarctic species that rode an "expressway" of northbound frigid water to cover the globe when the continent cooled 30 million years ago.

About 120,000 underwater species have been found so far, still less than half the number estimated to exist in the oceans. For example, beyond the 16,000 fish species already known to science, another 4,000 await discovery, many of them in the tropics.

"The census may offer a new map, a new bio-geography, of all ocean life," says deepsea biologist Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University's Ocean Sciences Centre near St. John's, N.L.

Snelgrove, leader of the team that is compiling the findings, says it's giving scientists better tools for predicting the presence or absence of species in places like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where, at depths down to 2,500 metres, hundreds of rare or unknown species lurk.

Ron O'Dor, a Halifax marine biology professor, said the census is giving a "global picture of the movements of (marine) animals, whether swirling in eddies the size of Ireland, or commuting 8,000 kilometres across ocean basins."

The full census will be released in 2010. The progress report to come on Tuesday is the fourth since the global collaboration began in 2000.

The idea behind the census is to gather critical information to foster sustainable fisheries, conserve species, reverse habitat losses, reduce pollution impacts and respond to climate change.

According to Ian Poiner, chairman of the international scientific steering committee for the census, the release of the finished report in 2010 will be a milestone.

"After 10 years of new global research and information assembly by thousands of experts the world over, it will synthesize what humankind knows about the oceans, what we don't know, and what we may never know - a scientific achievement of historic proportions," said Poiner, also CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science.