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Thousands of species added to known marine life
October 6th, 2010
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
More than 6,000 species of new marine life has been discovered and categorized, following one of the most ambitious and immense studies in the history of scientific inquiry. The Census of Marine Life, a ten-year project to count and list the species that live in the planet's oceans concluded today this week, adding thousands of species to the list of known ocean-dwelling plants and animals.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The Census of Marine Life has sent more than 500 expeditions across every ocean on the planet. The study has broadened the number of described species to 201,206 and has identified more than 6,000 new species. The decades-long study has increased the sheer volume of humanity's understanding of the oceans' denizens, and how they are intricately connected.
The $650 million initiative, $75 million of which came from the Sloan Foundation, launched 570 expeditions that journeyed from Antarctica to the tropics. Heralded 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.
Australian marine ecologist Ian Poiner, who chairs the project's steering committee, told MSNBC that the results will serve as a "global baseline" for assessing the state of the ocean's species over the decades to come. "That's not only something that wasn't available in 2000," he told me from London, where the census' final results were shared with the world today. "Many said it was too big a challenge and could not be done."