Marine Census Clears Halfway Mark By Listing Over 120,000 Species

An ambitious census of the world's marine life that promises to become an invaluable tool for conservationists has passed its halfway mark.

Scientists on the Census of Marine Life project have gathered the names of 122,500 different marine species, as part of a global effort that is due to be completed in 2010.

Biologists estimate around 230,000 marine species are known to science, although there could be three times as many in the oceans which are as yet undiscovered.

Scientists are scouring databases around the world to produce a single definitive list of the world's marine life. So many of the species had been named more than once that nearly a third of the names, or 56,400, had to be struck from the draft list.

One organism, the Breadcrumb sponge, which smells like exploded gunpowder, had been given 56 different names since it was first described in 1766.

It is not surprising the organism was given so many names, says Edward vanden Berghe, a scientist on the project who heads the Ocean Biogeographic Information System at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

"It can look completely different according to the conditions in which it grows, and as a consequence, people have been describing the same thing over and over again, using a different name each time," he said.

The project aims to reduce confusion over the names of species and set a baseline for populations of marine organisms that conservationists can use to monitor how well organisms in different habitats are surviving.

"What we were trying to do before this was speak a common language without a dictionary," vanden Berghe added.

The census will also correct mistakes by the founder of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, who assigned four names to the same species of sperm whale, a mistake noticed years ago, but still repeated in textbooks and scientific databases.

The names of the species are being recorded on the new World Register of Marine Species, which is expected to become a vital resource for researchers studying fisheries, invasive and threatened species and marine ecosystems.

"It will eliminate the misinterpretation of names, confusion over Latin spellings, redundancies and a host of other problems that sow confusion and slow scientific progress," said Mark Costello a senior Census of Marine Life official at the University of Auckland.