December 11, 2006

Cape Cod Times

Ocean census reveals marvels

By MIKE TONER

Cox News Service

ATLANTA - Off the coast of New Jersey, they mapped a school of 20 million fish that covered an area the size of Manhattan.

Two miles down in the Atlantic, they found life around a thermal vent spouting water hot enough to melt lead.

And high over the Pacific, they followed a flight of sooty shearwaters as the seabirds flew 40,000 miles in 200 days.

New highlights of a decade-long effort to assess the diversity and distribution of life in the world's oceans - reported yesterday by the international Census of Marine Life - show why the watery two-thirds of the planet is still Earth's final frontier.

The census, conducted by a global network of researchers in 70 nations, has just completed its sixth year - and the surprises show no sign of slowing.

''Each Census expedition reveals new marvels of the ocean,'' says Fred Grassle, chairman of the project's scientific steering committee. ''With the return of each vessel, it is increasingly clear that more discoveries await marine explorers for years to come.''

The research teams have employed a host of new technologies to find and track marine species - satellites to track seabirds and sharks, underwater listening devices to track migrating salmon, and sonar-like devices to map constantly moving schools of fish.

Among the surprises from the project's 19 expeditions in 2006, financed primarily by governments, independent research institutions, foundations and corporations were scores of species that are completely new to science.

Near Easter Island, they discovered a ''hairy'' crab with feathery growths on its arms - quickly dubbed the Yeti crab - that scientists say represents a whole new genus of crustacean.

In a submarine canyon off the coast of Portugal they found a single-celled organism so large that it, and the fragile, centimeter-wide shell that encases it, is visible to the naked eye.

Beneath 2,000 feet of Antarctic ice, they found unknown jellyfish and other marine creatures that appear to thrive in waters that are darker and colder than any on Earth.

In some cases, it was not the creatures themselves but their behavior that provided the surprises.

In the mid-Atlantic, they discovered a veritable rush hour that occurs each day at dusk - as millions of tiny organisms ''commute'' from the ocean depths to the surface, where they feed - and then return to the twilight of the depths to spend the day.

On an underwater peak in the Coral Sea, they found a species of shrimp, nicknamed the Jurassic shrimp, thought to be extinct for more than 50 million years.

And although sharks are among the most recognized and feared creatures in the ocean, researchers say the census shows that 70 percent of the world's oceans, and all deep waters, are shark-free.

Researchers say they aren't sure how much remains to be discovered, but they say there is little doubt that, as the census enters its seventh year, the 78,000 species they have cataloged so far barely scratched the surface of the ocean's diversity.

One hint of what they don't know comes from a DNA analysis of a single liter of seawater collected in the Pacific off the coast of Oregon, suggesting the presence of 20,000 different kinds of microorganisms.

Based on that sample, researchers estimate the total number of species in the oceans between 5 million and 10 million.

(Published: December 11, 2006)