Scientists announce major progress towards historic Census of Marine Life in 2010

In 2010, the first global Census will relate:

• Distribution of animals in the ocean and their changing ranges;
• Diversity as the total number of species in the ocean (known and unknown);
• Abundance of major species groups and how they have changed over time;

With regard to distribution, the Census will offer:

• Range maps for known marine species;
• Major global traffic patterns of top marine species;
• Global maps of species richness, showing hotspots and the extent of biodiversity in the oceans

With regard to diversity, the Census will offer:

• A complete list of named marine species, likely to range between 230,000-250,000, as well as fresh estimates of species yet to be discovered;
• Web pages for the great majority of the named species, compiled in cooperation with the Encyclopaedia of Life;
• DNA identifiers ("barcodes") for many species
With regard to abundance, the Census will offer:
• New estimates of biomass at various levels in the food chain and for selected species;
• Estimates of changes in the relative frequency of small versus large animals;
• Estimates of abundance that has been or might be lost soon.

Top highlights, fourth progress report of the Census of Marine Life:

Antarctic ancestry of many deep-sea octopuses worldwide
Within their mandate "to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans - past, present, and future," Census of Antarctic Marine Life scientists report the first molecular evidence that a large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean.

Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large ice sheet grew, nature created a "thermohaline expressway," a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content.

Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved; some octopuses, for example, losing their defensive ink sacs - pointless at perpetually dark depths.

This revelation into the global distribution and diversity of deep sea fauna, to be reported Nov. 11 in the journal Cladistics, was made possible by intensive sampling during Census International Polar Year expeditions.

Highlights on offer include as well:

Distribution: Scientists discover both a "White Shark Café" and a "sturgeon playground" in the Pacific, as others explore life on a "new continent" in the mid-Atlantic, in oceanic canyons, around Earth's deepest hot vents, and in the world's coldest, saltiest seawater;

Diversity: Deep sea explorers discover new forms of life, including behemoth bacteria, colossal sea stars, astonishing Antarctic amphipods and a mammoth mollusc, and find familiar species in many new places.

Experts also estimate that, beyond the 16,000 marine fish species already known to science, another 4,000 await discovery, many of them in the tropics.

Abundance: Researchers find a sea floor carpet of bugs and a city of brittle stars, and document bluefin tuna abundance in the early 1900s by scouring fishery reports, fishing magazines and other records.

Meanwhile, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System has grown to include more than 120,000 species. And a rapidly-expanding reference library of DNA barcodes of marine species recently helped reveal inaccurate labelling of sushi in New York City and elsewhere.

As well, the national and regional networks expediting much of the Census work expanded from 10 to 12 since 2006. They and the field projects of the Census established precedent-setting ethical standards for marine research.