First Census of Ocean Life Uncovers 6,000 New Species

LONDON (Oct. 4) -- Taking a census of marine life is not as easy as knocking on doors. But after a 10-year effort that included diving into icy waters, guiding robots into pitch-black depths and laying out a vast network of microphones to spy on migrating fish, scientists today unveiled the results of the first-ever accounting of the ocean's creatures, including some 6,000 new species.

The $650 million Census of Marine Life, designed to catalog what lives in the ocean, where and to what extent, found strange new beasts such as a hairy white crustacean nicknamed the yeti crab, and uncovered several species thought to be extinct. It also compiled a kind of White Pages of the sea listing species and their "addresses" in the underwater kingdom.

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New Ocean Life Discovered

Metapseudes sp., a potentially new species that was found in abundance among the coral rubble at Ningaloo, Western Australia.

New Ocean Life Discovered

A new species of hydromedusae, Bathykorus bouilloni, common below 1000 meters. Hundreds of Bathykorus bouilloni were observed by a remotely operated vehicle in the Arctic, showing that a new species can be common in a habitat.

New Ocean Life Discovered

This bizarre new copepod, Ceratonotus steiningeri, was first discovered 5,400 meters deep in the Angola Basin in 2006. Within a year it was also collected in the southeastern Atlantic, as well as some 13,000 kilometers away in the central Pacific Ocean. Scientists are puzzled about how this tiny (0.5mm) animal achieved such widespread distribution as they are about how it avoided detection for so long.

New Ocean Life Discovered

Vigtorniella sp. (polychaete worm) found at a whale fall at Sagami Bay, Japan at a depth of 925 meters. Whale fall is the term used for a whale carcass that has fallen to the ocean floor. Whale falls were first observed in the 1980s, with the advent of deep-sea robotic exploration.

New Ocean Life Discovered

Alviniconcha sp. (Hydrothermal vent snail) Suiyo Seamount, Tokyo Hydrothermal Vent. This snail inhabits deep-sea hydrothermal vents and harbors chemoautotrophic symbionts in its gills. This individual is probably a new species, and only a single specimen has been discovered to date. Where are its peers?

New Ocean Life Discovered

An undescribed zoanthid species, Neozoanthus sp., collected at Sykes Reef, Heron Island in 2009.

New Ocean Life Discovered

The project "far exceeded any dream or vision that I had," census co-founder Jesse Ausubel of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which helped fund the census, said at a news conference at London's Royal Institution. "The census has been a machine for discovery. ... It's very exciting."

Among the wonders revealed by the census's 2,700 scientists, who came from countries all over the world and took voyages to every part of the sea:

The first animals known to spend their whole lives without oxygen. Rare creatures called loriciferans, they may resemble early life forms that thrived before Earth was rich in oxygen.

A new species of lobster that measures 20 inches long and weighs nearly 9 pounds. Finding such a huge and showy creature is "like finding a new species of bird in Europe," said marine ecologist Enric Sala, a member of the census steering committee.

A clam that was thought to be extinct until scientists stumbled across it near the coast of Colombia. The clam is a living fossil that thrived when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Some of this research would have happened without the census, said Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University of Newfoundland in an e-mail to AOL News, but it would've been "uncoordinated [and] local in focus," and probably fewer countries would have participated.

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Some of the census findings were sobering. Researchers estimated that the biggest, fastest ocean hunters -- charismatic species such as whales, tuna and sharks -- have declined, on average, by nearly 90 percent in the past few centuries, because of over-hunting and habitat destruction. Also suffering are the microscopic creatures called plankton, which serve as the base of the food web and which are declining because of changing ocean temperatures.

Census scientist Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told AOL News that researchers scouting the seafloor near New Zealand found a cluster of new "methane seeps," where bizarre creatures thrive on methane being released from sediments. But all of the seeps were already damaged by fishing trawls that had been dragged along the ocean bottom.

"Humans have damaged the deep sea even before we discover the habitat," Levin said, adding that perhaps the greatest achievement of the census is that "it has raised the international consciousness of this issue and why it might matter."