Lost and found: Census of Marine Life turns up hundreds of species

'The deep sea creature found in the Coral Sea, the Jurassic Prawn, was previously believed to be extinct.'

by Jeni Bone
1:48 AM Tue 5 Oct 2010 GMT

A species that had previously been deemed extinct, was discovered on an underwater peak in the Coral Sea, along with hundreds of new species, in a $669m decade-long global marine survey, 'Census of Marine Life', conducted by scientists across the area between Australia and New Caledonia.

The 12cm long Neoglyphea neocaledonica, or 'Jurassic shrimp', was turned up among more than 30 million observations of 120,000 species, showing the study team just how much there is still to learn about ocean life.

Launched in London last night, the First 'Census of Marine Life' aimed to establish a baseline against which 21st century changes can be measured. It found more than 6,000 potentially new species, describing 1200 of them in detail. But scientists said they estimate more than 750,000 species remain undiscovered.

The report says little is known about four out of five species in Australian waters, a greater proportion than any other continent. Between a third and half of the hundreds of soft corals described on the Great Barrier Reef and Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef in the past decade were new finds.

The chairman of the census steering committee, Australian Ian Poiner, said the researchers 'systematically defined for the first time both the known and the vast unknown, unexplored ocean'.

'Sea life provides half of our oxygen and a lot of our food and regulates climate,' he said.

Researchers tracked migratory routes using sound, satellites and electronics. They found that, by weight, up to 90 per cent of marine life was microbial. But more than 20 per cent of the oceans volume remained unmapped by scientists.

More at http://www.coml.org/

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