INDEPTH: OCEANS
The realm of Neptune
The Census of Marine Life
Robin Rowland, CBC News Online | November 12, 2003
There's an old question. How many fish are there in the sea?
There's a new answer – 15,304 species of fish – and the scientists are still counting.
About 70 per cent of the Earth's surface is covered by deep, wide oceans.
In just three cubic metres of ocean in a coral reef in the Pacific Ocean, off the island of New Caledonia, there are 130,000 mollusks from 3,000 species. Many of those mollusks (a family that can include snails, oysters, mussels and the octopus) have never been described by science.
The scientists who counted the mollusks in that tiny fraction of the sea and all those fish species are part of the international Census of Marine Life.
For the past three years, more than 300 scientists from 53 countries have worked on the census, aimed at cataloguing the diversity of marine life and tracking how it changes over time.
As well as the 15,304 species of fish, the database includes between 194,696 and 214,696 species of animals and plants (there is disagreement among scientists on the definition of some species).
The Census – the acronym is CoML – has the ambitious goal of finding, describing and understanding all marine life. Only that way will human beings know the impact of climate change, fishing, and oil and mineral exploration.
Courtesy CoML
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Ronald O'Dor of Dalhousie University, the project's chief scientist, says, "Our goal by 2010 is to know as much about life in the oceans as we know about life on land now. No one would claim that we know everything about life on land. There are probably still a few hundred thousand beetles in tropical forests that haven't been described. We'd like to aim for parity."
The project began in 1995 when scientists became concerned that humans were changing the diversity of the ocean and that some parts were being changed irreversibly.
So far the project has spent about $70 million US. It will eventually cost about $1 billion US. Funding comes from private foundations and governments of the participating countries.
The project scientists are identifying an average of three new marine species each week. They expect to add 3,000 fish species to the database by the time the project ends in the year 2010.
Courtesy CoML
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The census has a number of goals:
- To identify threatened species.
- To identify important breeding areas.
- To help fisheries authorities develop sustainable management of marine resources.
- To help identify pharmaceutical and industrial spinoffs from marine species.
As well, the census is helping to develop new technology that will enable the scientists to reach parts of the ocean that are unreachable today.
O'Dor says the oceans are most unexplored. "The enormous diversity of marine life is not only a crucial indicator of the condition of our oceans, it is key to sustaining them in a healthy state.
"Increases in toxic compounds and temperature in the sea are occurring globally with consequences that are hard to predict. Accurate measures and predictions of species distribution, abundance and natural variation through time across a range of species are urgently needed to help policy-makers respond appropriately to the consequences of changes in the ocean," the census says.
 PART II: THE SIX REALMS OF THE OCEAN
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