Census of Marine Life

▪ 2007

    Marine scientists reported in 2006 that the diversity of microscopic marine organisms in the oceans was 10 to 100 times greater than previously estimated and noted that some seawater samples they had collected contained more than 20,000 kinds of microorganisms per litre. The scientists were engaged in the Census of Marine Life, a wide-ranging multinational scientific collaboration started in 2000 to catalog as many species of the world's oceans as possible, determine their distribution and patterns of movement, and assess how populations of ocean life were changing over time.

      In the first years of the 10-year program, newly formed scientific teams undertook pilot projects to help plan the census and evaluate where to focus its efforts. The challenge was formidable. The oceans cover 70% of the surface of the Earth and contain much of its life, from microscopic cyanobacteria (one of the most abundant organisms on Earth) to the blue whale (the largest animal). The census needed to include both warm equatorial seas and ice-covered polar waters and to reach from great ocean depths in perpetual darkness to the sky above, where birds winged over vast stretches of open water. In addition, much of the ocean remained unexplored and unknown.

      By the end of 2006, more than 1,500 scientists from more than 70 countries were participating in the Census of Marine Life, which was associated or affiliated with a number of intergovernmental organizations and received financial and logistic support from many government agencies, private foundations, and nongovernmental scientific institutions. Many field projects were under way to assess different marine ecosystems. One key project was the tagging of thousands of animals of selected species with compact radio-transmitting devices both to track the movement of the animals via satellite and to obtain environmental data. Other components of the census were established to organize and make available via the Internet (www.iobis.org) the vast amount of data from the census, to gather and incorporate existing oceanographic records and information about the effects of fishing derived from historical archives, and to analyze the census information to help predict future changes in marine life populations.

      In the years that remained in the Census on Marine Life, scientists expected not only to continue to identify large numbers of previously unknown marine species but also to add to the store of knowledge about such well-known species as the bluefin tuna, southern elephant seal, and leatherback turtle. Through an understanding of the current status of the life of the sea, it might also be possible to take measures that would help preserve the ocean's biodiversity and in particular protect its endangered species.

David C. Hayes

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