HALIFAX, Canada (10 Dec 2006) -- Oceans around the globe are teeming with life and hundreds of species either unknown to science or thought to be extinct, according to researchers creating one of the most extensive inventories of the marine world. Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist with the Census of Marine Life, said that in the last year, an international team of scientists has discovered at least 500 new underwater species, including gangly and googly-eyed creatures that can live in the most hostile of environments. "The diversity in the oceans is huge and dramatic, more than anyone ever expected," the Halifax-based scientist said from London, where he was doing interviews prior to the release Monday of a report outlining some of the census's key findings. "Historically there was a belief that the deep ocean was a kind of desert and what we're essentially seeing is that that was an impression based primarily on a lack of technology." The findings are in stark contrast to a string of bleak scientific reports that have projected the virtual disappearance of all major commercial fish species in a matter of decades if fishing practices aren't changed. One recent report also found that oceans were being stripped of the rich diversity of life that is thought to make marine ecosystems around the world so productive. O'Dor, a professor marine biology at Dalhousie University, said the work of the census differs from most other studies because it is being done largely in water far off the coast, not in coastal areas where stocks are being imperilled by heavy fishing and pollution is thought to be affecting some species. "The places where diversity is disappearing is in the near-shore where people are polluting waters and increasing temperatures are affecting the coral reefs, but the deep ocean doesn't seem to be feeling any of these impacts yet," he said. The 2,000 researchers from 80 countries who are participating in the census are probing waters that have rarely been studied, in areas once thought to be beyond human reach. In one project, they lowered a camera 700 metres beneath the ice in Antarctica. The team expected to find nothing but a black hole in the area more than 200 kilometres away from open ocean. "When they looked into the camera they found abundant life -- jellyfish, crustaceans and fishes," he said. "It turned out to be alive and well and more than half the species they took pictures of were not species that people had recognized." One of the more captivating findings came when researchers found tiny shrimp and other life forms near a vent that was spewing fluids from the Earth's core at 407 C, a temperature so hot it would melt lead. Within seconds, the temperature dropped to a near freezing low of 2 C. O'Dor said scientists don't yet know how the creatures could survive such extreme variances. | | Scientists believe the census, now in its sixth year, is the most comprehensive recording of the diversity, distribution and abundance of global marine life. O'Dor said the last attempt to produce a picture of the international marine ecosystem was the Challenger scientific expedition in the late 1870s that laid the foundation of oceanography. Now, researchers are using remote operated vehicles that can be plunged kilometres below the water's surface, landers that sit on the ocean floor for six months taking pictures and new sonar technology that can photograph everything in the water. Researchers used the sonar photography just off the coast of New Jersey and discovered 20 million fish swarming in a school the size of Manhattan Island, making it the largest grouping of fish ever recorded. Another team came across a shrimp that was thought to have become extinct. O'Dor compared the discovery to one off Madagascar in the 1940s when scientists found a fish with legs that was known only through fossils and was believed to have disappeared. In the most recent case, a team surveying an underwater peak in the Coral Sea found the Jurassic shrimp, a beady-eyed crustacean which they thought had been extinguished 50 million years ago. "Going down in the ocean is almost like going backwards in time -- things that no longer survive in the fish-eat-fish world of the surface seem to still be hanging around down at the bottom of the sea," O'Dor said. O'Dor said the fact that the deep oceans appear to be in good health while inshore waters are facing challenges related to climate change, fishing and contamination should serve as a warning to governments that they need to consider their practices there. "There are interesting and exciting things in the ocean and we need to think seriously about what our strategy is going to be for preserving them," he said. The researchers said they are on schedule to produce an initial census in 2010. SOURCE - CTV |
