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Brilliant Pics of Bizarre Sea Critters

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tales-from-mos-eisley-cantina dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Today, scientists have announced the completion of the first ever Census of Marine Life. The colossal 10-year effort involved 2,700 researchers from 80 countries. To mark the occasion, Discover's blog 80beats has a photo gallery of some of the most marvelously strange sea creatures photographed in the course of the census. The blog post also explains some of the census's most important findings, including the dramatic decline of many commercially important large marine animals, and troubling new evidence of a decline in the phytoplankton that serves as the base of the marine food chain."

6 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. It amazes me by LiquidLink57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We seem to want to look toward space, toward distant planets trying to find even scant evidence of strange, spectacular creatures. And yet ones as strange and spectacular as you can imagine remain undiscovered right here at home.

    1. Re:It amazes me by Monchanger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think that depends on one's definition of "strange". Sure there's definitely room for marine biologists, physicists and chemists to learn from creatures inhabiting the deep. But all these newly discovered lifeforms are, as strange as they seem, still just distant cousins, restricted to evolutionary limitations. Glibly put, there are only so many fields which care about yet one more species of jellyfish.

      Scientific knowledge would grow by leaps and bounds with something truly alien. They'll settle for unrelated carbon-based life, but would love to study something which doesn't even have that in common. Other fields of science would absolutely love locating sentient life. I'm not sure how much spending that's worth, but it's far from worthless.

    2. Re:It amazes me by Urkki · · Score: 2, Insightful

      We seem to want to look toward space, toward distant planets trying to find even scant evidence of strange, spectacular creatures. And yet ones as strange and spectacular as you can imagine remain undiscovered right here at home.

      You wish we want to look towards space. In reality "we" on average want to look towards a TV set or a gaming/internet device.

      Fortunately some of us are still looking towards space, while others are also looking into the oceans (as proven by TFA). Even with all the attention wasted on rectangular displays showing imaginary things, or at best irrelevant trivia, we may still have hope.

    3. Re:It amazes me by Bertie · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And we're busily killing them off.

  2. How can a "first ever" census... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...show a decline?

    Wouldn't this census establish the baseline?

  3. Re:Census? by calderra · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A census is an attempt to measure the populace. You can measure as much as you can, then guess at the rest, which is what every population census tries to do. (We measured X immigrants, and we know that's not all of them, but with reasonable certaintly we can assume there are between W and Y immigrants).