Scientists Discover New Marine Life

As reported in an article found on CDNN Scientists working on the sea usually are overlooked and deprived of the glamour and glory heaped usually on space explorers. But scientists hoped to reverse this condition with a billion dollar project that involved taking a census of all marine life.

During the census many interesting new marine species were found. A submarine was moving under the oceans between the Azores and Iceland when scientists spotted a hitherto unknown marine life form.

It had a flower-shaped head purple in color with a green sinuous stalk of body and measured several centimeters in length.

The crew is still debating whether the animal was only a type of fish. Michael Vecchione, who was onboard the submarine, said that it was an animal that did not match any known characteristics of marine life.

In the past 3 years, 300 scientists from 54 countries have been identifying three fresh species of fish per week. It is said there are now 15,304 fish species in the oceans, and about 210,000 varieties of marine organisms.

The census will complete in 2010. Scientists believe about 25,000 undiscovered species of marine life will be part of that list.

Sadly, the creature discovered by Vecchione's group had disintegrated by the time it reached the surface. But as the submersible traveled along the sea floor three miles under the Atlantic, researchers discovered other unknown species. One was a webbed octopus 30 cm in length, and another was a kind of lizard skittering on the ocean floor.

Up until now, only a small amount of documentation is available on marine life, and the available documentation is mostly about 200 relatively large species that are fished commercially. High costs prohibited further exploration in the deep oceans until the invention of submersibles and remote operated vehicles (ROVs).

Marine biologists feel that in order to realize the impact of pollution, climate change, and overfishing on marine ecosystems, it is necessary to get a full picture of the varieties and numbers of marine life.

To that end, researchers in British Columbia fitted tiny electronic tags to salmon to track their journey from rivers to seas in an effort to determine why their stock is dwindling.

In other experiments, scientists have fitted acoustic devices on blue and yellow fin tuna to map their migration paths and feeding areas. The devices are connected to satellites and they also gather data about deep sea terrain.

Geneticists have been using newer DNA sequencing technologies to catalog microbes that are a millimeter long. When the project gets done, they hope that a base line would have been established from which it would be possible to predict change.

Ron O'Dor, chief scientist from the census team, said that major parts of the seas have not been explored till now. He said only 0.01% of the seas have been sampled biologically to date.