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  BBC 4 May 06
Deep ocean trawl nets new 'bugs'
By Richard Black

PlanetArk 5 May 06
Scientists Probe Atlantic, Find New Species of Life
Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO - Scientists have found about 10-20 new species of tiny creatures in the depths of the Atlantic in a survey that will gauge whether global warming may harm life in the oceans, an international report said on Thursday.

The survey, of tropical waters between the eastern United States and the mid-Atlantic ridge, used special nets to catch fragile zooplankton -- animals such as shrimp, jellyfish and swimming worms -- at lightless depths of 1-5 km (0.6-3 miles).

"This was a voyage of exploration ... the deepest parts of the oceans are hardly ever sampled," said Peter Wiebe, the cruise's scientific leader and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States.

"We found perhaps 10-20 new species of zooplankton," he said of the 20-day voyage by 28 scientists from 14 nations in April.

Most life, including commercial fish stocks, is in the top 1 km of water, but the scientists said the survey showed a surprising abundance even in the depths.

The survey will provide a benchmark to judge future changes to the oceans.

New finds among thousands of zooplankton species caught included six types of ostracods, a shrimp-like creature, and other species of zooplankton such as swimming snails and worms.

Zooplankton are animals swept by ocean currents, mostly millimetres-long but ranging up to jellyfish trailing long tails. Among 120 types of fish caught, the scientists found what may be a new type of black dragonfish, with fang-like teeth, growing up to about 40 cm (15 inches), and a 20-cm-long great swallower, with wide jaws and a light-producing organ to attract prey.

"By 2010, the research ... will provide a baseline against which future generations can measure changes to the zooplankton and their provinces, caused by pollution, over-fishing, climate change, and other shifting environmental conditions, " said Ann Bucklin, lead scientist for the zooplankton census project at the University of Connecticut.

GLOBAL WARMING

Most scientists believe the planet is warming because of a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mainly from human burning of fossil fuels in power plants, vehicles and factories since the Industrial Revolution.

The oceans absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide but the process raises levels of carbonic acid in the seas. That build-up could threaten marine life, for instance by making it harder for crabs or oysters to build shells.

Zooplankton are a key to transporting carbon dioxide to the depths because they can swim 500 metres (yards) up and down daily. Many species eat their own weight every day in plant phytoplankton species near the surface. By one estimate, 10,000 kg (22,000 lb) of plant phytoplankton is needed to feed 1,000 kg of small zooplankton.

The expedition was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and used NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown. The findings are also part of a wider Census of Marine Life trying to map the oceans. Scientists from Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States took part.

BBC 4 May 06
Deep ocean trawl nets new 'bugs'
By Richard Black Environment Correspondent, BBC News website

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science.

They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish.

The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world.

Plankton form the base of many marine food chains, and some populations are being disrupted by climatic change. Zooplankton are tiny marine animals. Many live on floating plants (phytoplankton), and many are in turn eaten by fish, mammals and crustaceans.

One of the aims of the Census of Marine Zooplankton (CoMZ), part of CoML, is to provide a global inventory of these tiny organisms which will help scientists look for changes induced by climate variations or other factors

"The deep ocean below 1,000m (3,300ft) is rarely sampled," observed Peter Wiebe from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, lead scientist on the recent voyage. "It's very difficult, you need many thousands of metres of cable," he told the BBC News website.

"We were able to sample at 1,000m intervals down to 5,000m (16,500 ft)."

Gooey creatures

Thousands of specimens were captured during the cruise, of which 500 have been catalogued. They include shrimp-like copepods and ostracods, swimming worms, and tiny jellyfish - some of the gooiest and most fragile animals in the sea.

Most are adjusted to living in the cool deep, where temperatures hover around one or two Celsius. Bringing them to the surface meant transporting them through a layer of much warmer water, around 27C. As soon as they came on board ship, they were plunged into ice-cooled buckets to restore a semblance of their usual habitat; even so, many perished before they could be studied.

This was one of the first projects to sequence DNA at sea, a process which Dr Wiebe believes will become much more common as scientists seek quick and easy ways to identify species.

"Many of these creatures occur in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and you can't tell them apart visually, but maybe we'll discover that genetically they are different," he said.

"If you say 'how do you sample the oceans and see what global climate change is doing?', you've got to have the background data."

Several more voyages are planned in the next two years specifically to examine zooplankton, and scientists involved in CoMZ are also finding places on other cruises in relevant areas.

By the time CoML ends in 2010, they hope to have found and studied every zooplankton species in the ocean.
links
The Census of Marine Life website has more details and photos
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