Marine Life

An important step toward understanding the full diversity of marine life began in 2000 with the Census of Marine Life (CoML), a ten-year international initiative to study what lives in the oceans. Researchers from over 70 nations are involved in projects addressing the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life today, in the past, and projected into the future. All habitats in the oceans are being explored and organisms ranging from microbes to whales are being investigated to create a huge database of all known marine life. Findings announced so far include thousands of new species, previously unknown migration routes for fish, and an unexpected density and diversity of creatures living deep under the ice in the Arctic Ocean. A study published in 2006 applied a new DNA-identification technique to microbes taken from the ocean and found over 20,000 types of bacteria in a liter of sea water—over ten times the biodiversity predicted. Much of the diversity comes from rare bacteria that had not been detected in previous studies of marine microbes.