A difficult or near-impossible task is sometimes described as "trying to count the fish in the sea." But since the year 2000, marine scientists have been trying to do exactly that with a ten-year global Census of Marine Life (CoML). Scheduled to be completed in two years, the project aims to catalog much of the life in the sea.
Life on land began "only" 400 million years ago. In the oceans, however, it started about 3.2 billion years earlier, when our planet was just 1.34 billion years old. The oceans now contain 99 percent of the Earth's living space and about 80 percent of all its life forms.
Despite this, between only 5 and 10 percent of that living space has been explored. This means that over the last 200 years of organized marine biological research, science has barely sampled the vast populations of the seas. This ignorance has suggested that a massive, complex program of exploration be initiated to know and understand the greatest living mass on our planet. Here new discoveries will become the rule rather than the exception.
The so-called black smokers on the seafloor are an example. Thirty-two years ago an unknown life system was found at a depth of about 9,000 feet near the Galapagos Islands by an expedition that was looking for something else. The seafloor communities were clustered around hot water vents coming from cracks in a mid-ocean ridge. The organisms there were not fueled directly or indirectly by solar energy (photosynthesis) but rather by chemosynthesis of heat and chemicals from deep in the Earth's interior. This discovery was akin to finding life on another planet.
The CoML was organized in the late 1990s and began work in 2000. The idea was not just counting fishes but to catalog all sea life. It has evolved into a massive undertaking with a budget of $650 million, involving more than 2,000 marine scientists from 82 nations. Arguably, the census represents the largest single undertaking in the history of oceanography. The stated goals of the program are "to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the global ocean."
The founding sponsor for the project was the U.S.-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Over time, governments and the private sector have provided significant additional support. At present some 404 agencies, organizations, and regional programs are census partners and sponsors.
CoML's policy and governance supervision is provided by a 23-member international scientific steering committee. Overall management and coordination support is by the International Secretariat based at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C. The program has 17 research project areas that cover six ocean zones. While the census has developed some of the projects, most are ongoing research efforts that pre-dated it. The strength of the global effort is the extensive international coordination that makes these included programs more productive.
Results have been very impressive. CoML hopes to catalog between 230,000 and 250,000 species in the global oceans. This number could eventually reach more than one million. And just counting the fish has added 4,000 species to the known number of 16,000.
In addition to counting, some significant discoveries have been made. For example, while it was thought that hydrothermal vent communities worldwide would be found at about 9,000 feet, census researchers have found one at 13,400 feet. Further exploration will certainly find more deep sites. Another discovery revealed large, seasonal congregation areas—playgrounds—of sturgeon and sharks. Such animal behavior was previously unknown. This will help scientists to assess abundance to guard against overexploitation.
In the Antarctic, it was discovered that deep-ocean octopus species might have had their ancestors in the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent. As water conditions in their habitat changed, these animals were able to migrate northward to populate other oceans.
The current census is a major event in the history of oceanography and provides an excellent template for future large-scale research projects in the oceans. These will be those that no one nation or group can undertake alone but that would be entirely feasible through concerted international cooperation.
With only two years remaining, it is recognized that there still is much more to do. While the current census has been extraordinarily productive, already there are discussions about developing a follow-on program. In space parlance, this will be another "mission to planet Earth."
For more information see: www.coml.org