First Ocean Life Census Finds 6,000 New Species


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LONDON (Oct. 4) -- Taking a census of marine life is not as easy as knocking on doors. But after a 10-year effort that included diving into icy waters, guiding robots into pitch-black depths and laying out a vast network of microphones to spy on migrating fish, scientists today unveiled the results of the first-ever accounting of the ocean's creatures, including some 6,000 new species.

The $650 million Census of Marine Life, designed to catalog what lives in the ocean, where and to what extent, found strange new beasts such as a hairy white crustacean nicknamed the yeti crab, and uncovered several species though to be extinct. It also compiled a kind of White Pages of the sea listing species and their "addresses" in the underwater kingdom.

The project "far exceeded any dream or vision that I had," census co-founder Jesse Ausubel of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which helped fund the census, said at a news conference at London's Royal Institution. "The census has been a machine for discovery. ... It's very exciting."

Some discoveries include:

-- The first animals known to spend their whole lives without oxygen. Rare creatures called loriciferans, they may resemble early life forms that thrived before Earth was rich in oxygen.

-- A new species of lobster that measures 20 inches long and weighs nearly 9 pounds. Finding such a huge and showy creature is "like finding a new species of bird in Europe," said marine ecologist Enric Sala, a member of the census steering committee.

-- A clam that was thought to be extinct until scientists stumbled across it near the coast of Colombia. The clam is a living fossil that thrived when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

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