Census of Marine Life

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Important in the history of life on Earth are the several extinction events that killed millions of species. The most famous of these resulted in the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What is little recognized is that Earth is now in the midst of an extinction event of colossal magnitude and Homo sapiens is the cause. Since the Industrial Revolution we have turned up the Earth’s thermostat, fouled its waters, its air and are in the process of overcrowding her with huge numbers of hungry mouths to feed.

Among biologists greatest fears are that millions of species will go extinct before we even know they were here. Most folks have the idea that all the creatures of the Earth have been neatly tagged and identified. Not so. Based on the rate new species are discovered, vast numbers of undiscovered species exist.

A partial remedy for this is the Census of Marine Life begun in 2000. The goal is to discover and catalog as many of the sea’s inhabitants as possible as well as understand their distribution, diversity and abundance. The census ends in 2010.

Why bother? Well some estimates foretell an end to all commercial fisheries by 2050. We already find supermarket freezers filled with fish once considered ‘trash fish’. Not so long ago no one dreamt of eating them. This census will help identify where stocks of fish are and how best to manage them in order to maintain a commercial fishery. Not only that, but it's impossible to rebuild an environment (should we become so wise) if we don’t know what is here.

This is scary stuff to someone looking at this from the perspective of a time when 2-3 billion people populated this planet not 6-7 billion and growing fast, needing electricity, fuel, food, products of manufacture and medical care.