By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer Mon
Oct 4, 3:14 pm ET
WASHINGTON The world's oceans may be vast and deep, but a decade-long count
of marine animals finds sea life so interconnected that it seems to shrink the
watery world. An international effort to create a Census of Marine Life was
completed Monday with maps and three books, increasing the number of counted
and validated species to 201,206.
A decade ago the question of how many species are out there couldn't be
answered. It also could have led to a lot of arguments among scientists. Some
species were counted several or even dozens of times, said Jesse Ausubel of the
Alfred Sloan Foundation, the co-founder of the effort that involved 2,700
scientists.
The $650 million project got money and help from more than 600 groups,
including various governments, private foundations, corporations, non-profits,
universities, and even five high schools. The Sloan foundation is the founding
sponsor, contributing $75 million.
Click image to see photos from the marine census
AFP/Census of Marine Life
But what scientists learned was more than a number or a count. It was a sense
of how closely life connects from one place to another and one species to
another, Ausubel said.
Take the bizarre and minuscule shrimp-like creature called Ceratonotus
steiningeri. It has several spikes and claws and looks intimidating if it
weren't a mere two-hundredths of an inch long. Five years ago this critter had
never been seen before. No one knew of its existence.
Then, off the Atlantic coast of Africa as part of the census, it was found at a
depth of more than three miles below the surface. It was one of 800 species
found in that research trip, said discoverer Pedro Martinez Arbizu, a
department head at the German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research.
He was astonished to find that the tiny creature also was within the cataloging
he'd made earlier 8,000 miles away in the central Pacific.
There was that critter again. Same shrimpy creature, different ocean.
"We were really very, very surprised about that," Arbizu said in an interview.
"We think this species has a very broad distribution area."
In that way, Ceratonotus steiningeri exemplifies what the census found.
"We didn't know so much about the deep sea...," Arbizu said. "We believe now
that the deep sea is more connected, also the different oceans, than we
previously thought."
The census also describes a species of strange large squid that was only
recently found in waters more than 3,000 feet deep. The 23-foot-long squid has
large fins with arms and tentacles that have elbow-like bends. Scientists had
seen it in larvae form before, but not in its full-blown glory until it was
filmed at depth.
The census also highlighted marine life that makes commutes that put a suburban
worker's daily grind to shame. Before the census started, the migration of the
Pacific bluefin tuna had not been monitored much. But by tagging a 33-pound
tuna, scientists found that it crossed the Pacific three times in just 600
days, according to Stanford University's Barbara Block. A different species of
tuna, the Atlantic bluefin, migrates about 3,700 miles between North America
and Europe. Humpback whales do a nearly 5,000 mile north-south migration.
Still, that's nothing compared to the sea bird that Ian Poiner of Australia
studies.
He studied puffins that make a nearly 40,000-mile circle every year from New
Zealand to Japan, Russia, Alaska, Chile and back in what the census calls the
"longest-ever electronically recorded migration."
Other species, such as plankton and even seals, travel great lengths, but stay
in the same part of the ocean. They travel thousands of feet between the
surface into the depths of the oceans. The scientists measured elephant seals
that dived about 1.5 miles, Ausubel said.
The census found another more basic connection in the genetic blueprint of
life. Just as chimps and humans share more than 95 percent of their DNA, the
species of the oceans have most of their DNA in common, too. Among fish in
general, the snippets of genetic code that scientists have analyzed suggest
only about a 2 to 15 percent difference, said Dirk Steinke, lead scientist for
marine barcoding at the University of Guelph in Canada.
"Although these are really old species of fish, there's not much that separates
them," Steinke said.