WE OFTEN kid ourselves that we know all about planet Earth. But the truth is that we have only the dimmest idea about much of the green and blue smear on its surface where life is concentrated. Particularly the blue bit. The oceans remain an alien world, and the past year has brought home that ignorance with renewed force.
鈥淥ne has to be humble,鈥� said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Census of Marine Life project, an international collaboration of marine scientists. After 10 years鈥� work, the project has delivered its first, preliminary report. Marine species are being discovered at the rate of about 35 a week, the team announced, and there are an estimated 2 million still to come.
So it should take, oh, a bit over a thousand years for scientists to complete the census. But at least they now know better where to look. The sediments on the ocean floor contain huge numbers of entirely unknown species, mostly nematode worms.
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Unfortunately, as fast as we discover new creatures in the ocean, we are killing off the familiar ones. Cod were once so plentiful on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland that sailors said you could almost walk ashore on them. But 10 years after fishing halted off Canada鈥檚 Atlantic coast, the cod are still not recovering. The young survivors from the fishing holocaust turn out to be wimps that get swallowed by predators and can鈥檛 get the hang of successful reproduction.
Landmark research this year also revealed the former superabundance of many other fish species, particularly the big beasts of the oceans. A trawl of ancient fishing records revealed that 90 per cent of top predators died out within a decade of new fisheries being opened, usually before biologists turned up to do any counting. In the words of this magazine 鈥� yearning perhaps for the days when Hemingway figures duelled with marlin, sharks and swordfish across the oceans 鈥� 鈥渢he old men of the sea have all but gone鈥�.
Only weeks later, whale researchers came up with a similar equation for lost cetaceans. You might think we should have had these huge mammals figured, but it took modellers dabbling in the arts of DNA analysis to work out that once, maybe only a couple of centuries ago, there were 10 times as many whales in the oceans as we imagined. That鈥檚 a lot of blubber not to have noticed. To rub it in, Japanese researchers rummaging through old whale bits in a freezer found a completely new whale species.
But at least we are starting to pay attention. The discovery that military sonar is giving whales the bends made headlines round the world, as did a law-enforcement dash across the Southern Ocean to catch an illegal trawler hoovering up the last stocks of the Patagonian toothfish. Never let it be said that conservationists care only about the cuddlies.