JANUARY 2011: My Surface Interval named one of the best scuba diving blogs

Monday, February 16, 2009

Census of Polar Marine Life

You know how we all hate filling in the official form every ten years asking us what we do, how many people we've got stashed away at home and how much we earn?
Well thankfully there's a few scientists who can't get enough. And God love 'em because they've come up with an interesting study about marine life at either ends of the earth.
And there's some fantastic news. The Census of Marine Life recorded some 7,500 species in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the Arctic, including several hundred that researchers believe could be new to science.
But while polar bears live in the north and penguins prefer the south, researchers also found the Polar oceans shared some 235 species, including whales, worms, crustaceans and angelic like pteropods- despite being separated by nearly 7,000 miles.
University of Alaska Fairbanks plankton ecologist Russ Hopcroft, who took part in the Arctic survey said: "Finding species at both ends of the Earth — some of which don't have a known connection in between — raises a whole bunch of evolutionary questions."
The survey is one of several projects of the Census of Marine Life, an international effort to catalogue all life in the oceans which will be published next year.
Victoria Wadley, a researcher from the Australian Antarctic Division added: "The textbooks have said there is less diversity at the poles than the tropics, but we found astonishing richness of marine life in the Antarctic and Arctic oceans We are rewriting the textbooks."
I guess the polar oceans are not biological deserts after all.
S'pose I best start looking at that PADI Ice Diving Specialty.

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