Under the Sea: A Wave of Discoveries

By Bina Venkataraman, Globe Correspondent

An octopus ancestor lurks in the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica. A city of starfish dwell on the peak of an underwater mountain off the coast of New Zealand. And this winter, swarms of white sharks will convene in the Pacific to feed at a deep-ocean “café.”

These are just some of the reported discoveries of 2,000 scientists from 82 countries working to create the first “census” of marine life. A 10-year project to count and map all of the life in the world’s oceans is documenting extraordinary examples of the communities under the sea, from giant oysters in the eastern Atlantic to a carpet of tiny crustaceans in the Gulf of Mexico. The scientists, who began this effort in 2000, just released a report to update their findings, timed for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity this week in Spain. The census will be published in 2010.

More of their findings, videos, and images can be found here: www.coml.org