In SPIN
Ireland's science wildlife and discovery magazine
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Science Spin January 2009
Global census of marine life
Since 2000, scientists from around the world have been working on a census of marine life. At a recent meeting at Valencia in Spain the collaborating scientists met to review progress and to announce that the world's first marine census will be ready for release in 2010.
A soft coral, Dendronepthyla, from coral gardens off Lizard Island [Photo Credit: Gary Cranitch, Queensland Museum]
Ian Poiner, CEO of Australia's Institute of Marine Science, said the census will be a a major achievement synthesizing everything that we currently know about life in the oceans. When the project began many scientists thought it might be over ambitious, he said, yet, what is believed to be the largest, most complex marine programme ever undertaken is expected to deliver results on target.
Apart from the obvious listing of about a quarter of a million species, the census will map their known distribution and range, DNA identifiers will be given, and most will be described in a web based encyclopedia of life.
New discoveries are already beginning to turn up as a result of work being done on the census. In a study led by Dr Louise Allcock from the QUB School of Biological Science, molecular evidence was found tracing the origin of deep sea octupuses to a common ancestor that still exists in the Antarctic Southern Ocean.
The scientists believe that the octupuses began to migrate away from the cooling Antarctic 30 million years ago. Isolated in new ocean basins, the octupuses diversified, some losing their ink sacs because they had colonised the dark depths. "If octupuses radiated in this way," she said, "it's likely that other fauna did so also, so we have helped explain where some of the deep-sea diversity comes from."
