Marine catalogue of concern

An unprecedented collaboration of marine researchers celebrated earlier this month the completion of the first check on marine species. Oceans comprise two-thirds of the Earth’s surface but have been neglected by biologists more focused on terrestrial ecosystems. But a 10-year international project — the Census of Marine Life — reported this month its final report on the survey of ocean species, many of which were previously unknown to science. “The census encountered an unprecedented riot of species, which are the currency of diversity,” the report says. “It upped the estimate of known marine species from about 230,000 to nearly 250,000.” “With its collective digital archive grown to almost 30 million observations, the Census compiled the first regional and global comparisons of marine species diversity.” It helped to create the first comprehensive list of the known marine species, already passing 190,000 last month. Applying genetic analysis on an unprecedented scale to a dataset of 35,000 species from widely differing groupings of marine life, the Census mapped the proximity and distance of relations between different species, painting a new picture of the genetic diversity of marine organisms. The Census found living creatures everywhere it looked, even where the heat would melt lead, seawater froze to ice, and light and oxygen were lacking. Coastal species showed maximum diversity in the tropical western Pacific, whereas a high diversity of species in the open ocean was recorded across broad mid-latitudinal bands in all oceans. In deep water and on the deep-sea floor, the Census discovered patterns of life on ridges, seamounts, abyssal plains and the margins of continents and defined new provinces and classifications. After all its work, the Census team still could not reliably estimate the total number of species, the kinds of life, known and unknown, in the ocean. It could logically extrapolate to at least a million kinds of marine life that earn the rank of species and Feature