Dr. Wes Tunnell

Finally, it was recently announced that Dr. Wes Tunnell, Vice Chair of the US National Committee, was honored by Texas Sea Grant when they announced that their Loggerhead Sportsmanship Award will be named after him.

The award is given annually to the team judged to best embody the spirit of earnest competition while demonstrating exemplary decorum during the Loggerhead Challenge Regional Competition of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB), held in Corpus Christi. For more on this story please visit http://sci.tamucc.edu/news/2010/tunnell.html.

(Click to enlarge image) This is one of three putative new species of Enteropneust from the North Atlantic Ocean. (Credit: David Shale)

The Mid Atlantic Ridge Ecosystems (MAR-ECO) project of the Census of Marine Life recently returned from an expedition focused on the cold waters north of the Gulf Stream and the warmer waters to the south.

During more than 300 hours of diving, using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Isis, researchers surveyed flat plains, cliff faces and slopes of the giant mountain range that divides the Atlantic Ocean into two halves, east and west.   The ROV was equipped with an HD camera, allowing for the survey of over 50,000 meters of ocean floor in HD video.

Scientists believe the cruise will yield at least 10 new species currently undescribed and will lead to better understanding of the evolutionary processes that have shaped the deep-sea.  To view photos of species from the expedition and read the full press release, visit the MAR-ECO website. (http://www.mar-eco.no/mareco_news/2009/new_ecomar_discoveries)

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).

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Full press release (PDF)

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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.

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Google Map of study sites

ArcOD (Arctic Ocean Diversity) and CAML (Census of Antarctic Marine Life) researchers are startled to find the Polar oceans share 235 species.

These Polar Year results are milestones towards the historic 1st global ocean Census of Marine Life. Earth’s unique, forbidding ice oceans of the Arctic and Antarctic have revealed a trove of secrets to CoML explorers, who were especially surprised to find at least 235 species live in both polar seas despite an 11,000-kilometer distance in between.

View the full press release online or as a PDF.
View the image gallery.

To learn more about the Census of Marine Life and the projects ArcOD and CAML, please visit:

• Census of Marine Life (CoML)
• Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML)
• Arctic Ocean Diversity (ArcOD)

(Click to enlarge image) Sylvia Earle, a deep-sea explorer and advocate for the oceans, makes this wish: I wish you would use all means at your disposal -- films! expeditions! the web! more! -- to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. (Credit: TED / Asa Mathat)

Sylvia has been dedicated to educating the public on the importance of the global ocean both in our daily lives and the health of the planet. The Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) 2009 Conference in Long Beach, California brought together this year’s who’s who of the technology, science, business, and arts industries. The TED prize, awarded to three people annually, grants the winner “One Wish to Change the World – No Restrictions”. On February 5th, Sylvia Earle made the following wish:

“I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films! expeditions! the web! more! — to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.”

Congratulations to Sylvia in this grand achievement. To read more about Sylvia, her wish, and what can be done to make her wish a reality, please visit the TED conference website.

Ocean in Google Earth, which enables user to dive beneath the surface of the sea and explore the world’s oceans, was launched on February 2, 2009 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, CA.

“There’s no better dive than what’s riding along with Census of Marine Life researchers,” says Patrick Halpin, a Census of Marine Life scientist and director of the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University in Durham, NC. “In eight years of expeditions to remote and unexplored places in the ocean, Census of Marine Life scientists have found new life on nearly every expedition”.

In the CoML layer of this new feature of Google Earth, we provide rare glimpses of interesting new life forms from some of the most remote places on the planet, with stories of the courageous, inquisitive, and adventurous scientists who set out to find what lives below the surface.”

Users can follow along on scientific explorations to the coldest, saltiest water on the planet or to a new ocean environment created by an ice shelf break the size of Jamaica or to the hottest hydrothermal vent ever discovered—hot enough to melt lead! These journeys are but a few of the 129 possibilities for learning more about marine life available on the new Census of Marine Life layer in Ocean in Google Earth.