Posted on 11/15/2012 1:50:07 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Up to a million species live in the seas, and two-thirds of those ocean-dwellers may still be undiscovered, according to a new study that also cataloged all of the known species that dwell beneath the waves.
The findings, published today (Nov. 15) in the journal Current Biology, suggest that the oceans remain a vast, uncharted territory. The new registry could help guide marine conservation efforts by giving scientists a universal way to describe the underwater creatures.
"If you want to understand life on Earth, then of course you need to know what life there is on Earth," said the study's lead author, Ward Appeltans, a member of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). "If you want to protect the ocean you need to know what you want to protect."
Appeltans began assembling a European list of sea life in 1999. In 2007, his team decided to expand the effort to encompass all of the world's marine species. [Images: Catalog of Strange Sea Creatures]
It was a massive undertaking. Appeltans and colleagues contacted more than 250 world experts on marine life to catalog all known species.
"When there's a child that's born you need to go to city hall and register the name of the baby, but when you create a new species the only thing you need to do is publish a paper in an official journal," Appeltans told OurAmazingPlanet.
As a result, many species names were duplicated.
"For every five species that were described, two were described before," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
btw, They're up to 26,000 species so far..
Gallery: Creatures from the Census of Marine Life
Marine VenusCredit: I. MacDonald.
This Venus fly-trap anemone, living 4,920 feet (1500 meters) below the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico, is only one among thousands of photogenic species cataloged by the decade-long Census of Marine Life, which is drawing to a close this fall.
W’s Fault.
DNA is your friend.
“Most Ocean Species Remain Undiscovered”
Reminds me of your survival theory.
If they are undiscovered, how do they know how many of them there are?
Wow.....we need to spend a few hundred billion dollars to make sure no underwater sea creature is undocumented and therefore disenfranchised....by being nameless...
It’s bad for their self esteem ....imagine .... Floating around the vast ocean with no name....
It’s species discrimination ...
How could this possibly be known? If its undiscovered, you can’t know it’s undiscovered. Maybe everything’s been discovered. Or maybe there’s only 3 more species left undiscovered. This is called a wild a$$ guess.
They can tell they’re down there by the amount of traffic on the underwater proxy servers but they can’t actually identify them individually.
[you got a better answer?]...:-P
And why are crawfish called crawfish when they’re not fish at all?
And how may undiscovered plants and animals are endangered species? Maybe we should declare all the oceans off-limits to human activity to protect the unknown!
They know there’s undiscovered things because they haven’t discovered them yet.
[I used Occam’s chainsaw for this post]
I’ve been wondering about that too.
Kinda sticks in your craw, don’t it?
And if there are crawdaddies, are there also crawmommies?
What happens when they break up - or die? Crawidowes?
Are there little crawkiddies?
They refused the how many toilets question in the census.
Makes sensus to me.
Ha!!
Thank you!
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