Marine scientists have identified 17,650 species in ocean depths so far down that light no longer penetrates, the newest update in the years-long census of marine life released yesterday showed.
The oddest of their finds included the jumbo Dumbo, a 2m-long creature that swims by flapping large ear-like fins, like the cartoon elephant. The rare octopod was found at a depth of between 1,000m and 3,000m in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Census of Marine Life said.
But researchers were also astonished to lift up a worm from 990m beneath the Gulf of Mexico, only to find crude oil streaming from both the animal and the open hole.
“The ‘wildcat’ tubeworm had hit a gusher and was dining on chemicals from decomposing oil,” the scientists said in a press statement.
The ongoing global Census of Marine Life is the first attempt to take stock of the world’s oceans and their species, and has taken researchers into ocean regions rarely studied or visited. The census is to be published by next October in an online encyclopedia with a Web page for every species. Scientist expect that there will still be more than 1 million unknown ocean species at that point.
The report released yesterday documented the 17,650 species found deeper than 200 metres, the depth where darkness stops photosynthesis.
Nearly 6,000 of those species were found deeper than 1,000m, where marine life can be long-lived despite a meager diet and often must rely on “chemosynthetic” production of food instead of photosynthesis. Deep sea life can also survive if it has abundant food in higher layers that settles to the depths or that they can migrate to.
Scientists baited one trap with whalebone and sunk it in the Antarctic, where they found the region’s first recorded whalebone-eating worm, Osedax, thought to only exist in the northeast Atlantic and the northern Pacific.
“To survive in the deep, animals must find and exploit meager or novel resources and their great diversity in the deep reflects how many ways there are to adapt,” said Robert Carney of Louisiana State University, coleader of the group that studied life along the continental margins.
All told, 344 scientists from 34 countries — including Russia, Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay — have been working on this part of the project, the deep-sea census.
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