Ten-year ocean study reveals 'riot of species'

A "riot of species" has been uncovered in the world's oceans by the most comprehensive survey ever conducted of life in the seas, scientists said yesterday.

But the decade-long Census of Marine Life, the first global attempt to map the wildlife of the oceans, showed many species – from turtles to seabirds and sharks – were in decline in the face of human activity.

Dr Ian Poiner, chairman of the project's scientific steering committee, said that, from the Poles to tropical waters and the deep sea, there was an abundance of life.

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Many discoveries had been made of new life, with around 6,000 potential new species found by the project and the overall estimate of known marine species increasing from 230,000 to nearly 250,000.

But after a decade of work researchers warn they could still not reliably estimate the number of species in the oceans, and it is thought there could be at least a million species in the Earth's seas in total.

Some of the "most beautiful and wonderful" species found in the decade of discovery included a Jurassic shrimp thought to have become extinct 50 million years ago and a crab named the Yeti crab.

The census also included genetically sequencing tiny microbes to tell them apart, and Dr Poiner said there could be as many as one billion different types in the ocean.

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The project, which involved more than 2,700 scientists spending a total of 9,000 days at sea on more than 540 expeditions, also used new technology such as tagging fish to see where they were swimming and fitting seals with monitors to record data as they dived.

Discoveries included the revelation that North Atlantic tuna on the eastern US seaboard were the same fish as those off the coast of Spain or in the Mediterranean as they migrated across the ocean.

The census also showed life was found in the most inhospitable places, and was much more connected than previously thought, through genetic relationships between creatures and the movement of species.

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