CoML in the News 2009
The
Deep Sea World Beyond Sunlight
November
23, 2009
Census
of Marine Life scientists have inventoried an astonishing abundance,
diversity and distribution of deep sea species that have never known
sunlight – creatures that somehow manage a living in a frigid
black world down to 5,000 meters (~3 miles) below the ocean waves.
Revealed
via deep-towed cameras, sonar and other vanguard technologies,
animals known to thrive in an eternal watery darkness now number
17,650, a diverse collection of species ranging from crabs to shrimp to
worms. Most have adapted to diets based on meager droppings from the
sunlit layer above, others to diets of bacteria that break down oil,
sulfur and methane, the sunken bones of dead whales and other
implausible foods.
Five of
the Census’ 14 field projects plumb the ocean beyond light,
each dedicated to the study of life in progressively deeper realms
– from the continental margins (COMARGE: Continental Margins
Ecosystems) to the spine-like ridge running down the mid-Atlantic
(MAR-ECO: Mid-Atlantic Ridge Ecosystem Project), the submerged
mountains rising from the seafloor (CenSeam: Global Census of Marine
Life on Seamounts), the muddy floor of ocean plains (CeDAMar: Census of
Diversity of Abyssal Marine Life), and the vents, seeps, whale falls
and chemically-driven ecosystems found on the margins of mid-ocean
ridges and in the deepest ocean trenches (ChEss:Biogeography of
Deep-Water Chemosynthetic Systems).
Download:
Full
press release (PDF)
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CoML
Researchers Open a Window to Oceans Past
May
24, 2009
Drawing
from such unlikely sources as ships logs, tax records, literary
sources, and monastery archives, marine scientists are painting a
picture of past life in the global ocean. This picture is
proving to
be a powerful, and necessary, tool in assessing environmental change in
the ocean and associated ecosystems, for without it science’s
view of
these environments is limited to only a short span of history and
hamstrung by a narrow perspective. Utilizing these unorthodox
sources
of information, researchers from the History of Marine Animal
Populations project of the Census, are discovering some surprising
facts about human impact on the ocean: Prior to whaling pressure
arriving in the 1800s, New Zealand’s southern right whale
population
was roughly 30 times higher than today’s. Prior to
the 1800s, the
waters of the English Isles were home to orca and blue whales, as well
as porpoise, dolphins, and blue and thresher sharks. Written
records
from as early as the 2nd century CE suggest that the Romans used trawl
nets to catch fish. These and other results
are soon to be presented
in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the Oceans
Past II conference
(May 26-28, 2009). More information on the History of Marine
Animal
Populations project and the Ocean’s Past Conference is
available in a
detailed press
release or on the HMAP website.
To
learn more about this news, please view the full press release online
or as a PDF.
Please
also view the:
Image
Gallery
Video
Gallery
Google
Map of study sites
CoML
Explorers Find Hundreds of Identical
Species Thrive in Both the Arctic
and
Antarctic
February
17, 2009
