by Lee Seung-joon
There are rare octopus living 3,000 meters underwater that are referred as “Dumbo” by the way they have large, ear-like fins.
However, they are not the only resident in the deepest part of ocean. The octopus are actually one of thousands of newly discovered creatures by a 10-year effort by 2,700 scientists from the project, “Census of Marine Life.”
The project included thousands of researchers from 20 nations and 500 institutions around the world and it has been launched to identify every organism that lives in the earth’s river, sea and ocean systems. The census, broken into 17 global projects, focused on the creatures living in the deep level, the depth below 200 meters, where even sunlight is not reached.
The research team had last findings from the 4,000- to 6,000-meter deep level, also known as the Abyssal Plains, in the Middle Atlantic Ocean. Chair of the Census Scientific Steering Committee Dr. Ian Poiner said that the most exciting discovery comes from 5000 meter deep where most people mistakenly believe to be empty.
"One of the things that we should understand is that going into the census, it was the view, the common view that the deep ocean was a barren lifeless place. It's dark, it's cold and it's very high pressure. What the census has shown is that it is the opposite. It's a rich place. Rich with many types of species inhabiting many different habitats down there," said Dr. Poiner.
They found crabs, shrimps and worms which already have adapted themselves to consume food dropping from the sunlit layer or eat on the bacteria that break out oil, sulfur and methane at the bottom of the ocean. The researcher team already uncovered 6,000 new species.
However, Dr. Poiner believes that there is still much more to be discovered. "There are about 230,000 named marine species at the moment. We expect there will be about two million and there could be many more and that is not including the really tiny things, what we call the marine microbes,” he said.
They are not only adding more binomial nomenclatures on science text books, but they are giving crucial deep water information to sailors and fishermen to make better decision about diverse types of issues from over-fishing to climate change.
"Without that knowledge, we will struggle to manage our oceans, to utilize our oceans and we will struggle to understand the life systems that support our planet," said Dr. Poiner. With his decade long work of the census, Dr. Poiner was awarded International Cosmos Prize in 2011.