The largest marine census ever conducted – that is, a count of the organisms living in Earth’s oceans – drew to a close in 2010. It’s called the Census of Marine Life (CoML). Renowned ocean researcher Jesse Ausubel serves as the project director. He said this Census has changed our understanding of ocean life.
Jesse Ausubel: The total number of marine microbes known and described when the census began a bit more than a decade ago was only about 5,000. And, now, we have DNA sequences for hundreds of thousands. A gram of sand or mud at the bottom of the sea floor may have between 5,000 and 20,000 different forms of microbial life in it.
He said experts have used a combination of DNA analysis and video, acoustic and cell phone technology to figure out what’s living where, beneath the sea.
Jesse Ausubel : We’ve covered a lot of the world. We haven’t covered everyplace, but we have produced what we call a new biogeography. It’s like neighborhoods. It’s at least a start to the global picture.
Ausubel listed things his Census has help uncover, such as the location of the hottest ocean vent, and the status of herring as the world’s most widely distributed fish. He said the CoML has identified more than 200 thousand different named marine species -from plankton to minnows to sharks. He estimates that there are still more than a million forms of complex ocean life yet to be discovered.
Jesse Ausubel: Part of what the program offers to humanity is just the wonder of the world around us, including the incredible beauty of many forms of marine life. But the program is also intended to produce practical societal benefits.
One way the census is doing that, he said, is by identifying “baselines” of marine life across the globe, so humans now and into the future can pinpoint precisely how ocean life is changing. The census has also helped identify biological hotspots that merit international marine protection.
One of his favorite marine hotspots identified by the Census of Marine Life is inside the largest mountain range on Earth – the mid-Atlantic ridge – which is actually underwater, and extends all the way from Iceland to the South Atlantic.
Jesse Ausube: There’s a huge gap that goes throughout this mountain range, it called the Charlie Gibbs fracture zone, it turns out there’s lots of interesting life on both sides of this zone, you can think of it kind of like the Grand Canyon of the oceans, that’s likely to become a protected area.
He said that information about where life exists has also been used in places like Boston harbor, where CoML data has been used to identify shipping lanes so that sea traffic will have the least possible impact on marine life. Ausubel added that we humans impact ocean life in more ways than we generally imagine.
Jesse Ausubel: There’s a enormous attention right now to changes in weather and climate. But if you could turn the clock back 100 years, the climate wouldn’t be that different from today. But other things would be very different. One of them is light we’ve added a huge amount of light. And of course many forms of light are sensitive to light…different kind of microbes. And we really have very little knowledge of the ecological effects of nighttime illumination. Similarly we’ve added lots and lots of sound. In the oceans, we’ve estimated that half the amount of noise now comes from human activity (from marine motors, seismic testing, etc). Animals themselves of course use sound to communicate in the oceans. So I think this question of behavior of not only whales but other forms of life might differ is a real question.
He also credited politics – namely, the end of the cold war – with aiding the cooperation between nations so that scientists can now study the deep sea. He said international cooperation is what enabled the Census of Marine Life.
As of the fall of 2010, the collective digital archive of the Census of Marine Life – or CoML – had grown to 30 million observations, with contributions from 2,700 scientists hailing from 80 nations.
Dear Jesse,
While I agree it is desirable to have a census of marine life, which reminds me of E.O. Wilson’s ongoing work to catalogue species, please take a moment to look at the census of human life on Earth now. Human population numbers worldwide are 6.7+ billion in 2010 and expected to grow by a whopping 40% to a total of 9.1+/- billion. Is this unregulated global growth more likely sustainable or unsustainable, given a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth? Can we afford much longer to permit declining human fertility rates to blind us to the equally evident fact that human population numbers are rising by 75+/- million in our time.
If a viable way is not found soon and immediately implemented to humanely accelerate the current decline in human fertility rates worldwide, other ‘essential’ concerns will likely not take on the significance they do now.
The current gargantuan scale and unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers in our time is the global challenge that dwarfs all other human-driven threats to human wellbeing and environmental health, I suppose.
Thanks,
Steve
Thanks for your comment, Steve.
Beth
Dear Beth L,
Thanks for your confirmation. We are in agreement.
If it pleases you to do so, please consider an exchange of ideas between a friend and me from yesterday.
Friend —
Steve, I’m not sure that I get your point. What science is being suppressed or withheld? I’m thinking that the realities of things like overpopulation, overconsumption, etc. are axiomatic points. Or, as has been said before: You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Me —
Dear Friend,
You have asked the question very few people have been willing to ask. Thank you for doing so.
Inside and outside science, despite all the talk about independent-minded research, objective analysis, intellectual honesty and moral courage, there is something very few experts will acknowledge: human population dynamics is common to the population dynamics of other living things. In place of this scientifically-driven understanding they widely share and consensually validate the politically convenient, economically expedient, socially attractive and culturally syntonic idea that human population dynamics is different from the population dynamics of other living things. Their closely held misperception of what could be real is catastrophic because human beings are now known not to be exceptional in this way. Thanks to recent research we can understand how human population growth not only occurs like the population growth of other species, but also presents humanity with a non-recursive biological problem. It means that global human population growth is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop, a relationship between food and population in which food availability drives population growth, and population growth fuels the mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased evermore.
The best available scientific evidence appears to directly contradict the work of most current and former experts in the fields of population science and human demography, who erroneously hold the preternatural view that the human population dynamics is different from the population dynamics of other species. The textbooks our children and most of us have read are replete with all manner of pseudoscientific evidence regarding ways the human species is somehow different from other species with regard to population dynamics, among other things.
At least to me, this failure to adequately understand and openly communicate about human population dynamics has profound implications for the future of life on Earth.
Sincerely,
Steve
Dear Beth L, Jesse, Deborah, Beverly and Friends,
I make this appeal as one who lives, and to those of you who live, in a city on the top of the hill, with access to every material possession and creature comfort imaginable. You, I and millions of other people are among the lucky ones. People like the President of the Maldives are not so fortunate. The Maldivian President, for example, is likely comforted by many material things, but he does not live in “the shining city upon a hill.” No, he and billions of other similarly situated members of the human community share space-time at the bottom of the shining city upon a hill where you, I and millions of other people live so well. Think of millions on the hilltop and billions far below; millions with virtually everything and billions with what trickles down to them, most in squalid and threatening conditions. This ever widening imbalance is shocking, morally outrageous and soon to become patently unsustainable. Perhaps necessary change toward common sense and doing the right thing sustainably is in the offing.
As you know, a global gag has been effectively established by the clever, arrogant, foolhardy, wealthy and powerful masters of the universe among us to prevent open discussion of the subject of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth by human beings with feet of clay. This denial needs to end. To do otherwise would be tantamount to dealing dishonestly and deceitfully with science, humanity and God, would it not?
Sincerely,
Steve
Dear Jesse, Deborah, Beverly and Friends,
As humanity’s most luminous beacon of truth, science provides us with
a last best hope for the survival of life as we know it on Earth. We
must make certain that scientific evidence is never downplayed,
distorted and denied by religious dogma, politics or ideological
idiocy.
Let us not fail for another year to acknowledge extant research of
human population dynamics. The willful refusal of many too many
experts to assume their responsibilities to science and perform their
duties to humanity could be one of the most colossal mistakes in human
history. Such woefully inadequate behavior, as is evident in an
incredible conspiracy of silence among experts, will soon enough be
replaced with truthful expressions by those in possession of clear
vision, adequate foresight, intellectual honesty and moral courage.
Hopefully leading thinkers and researchers will not continue
supressing scientific evidence of human population dynamics and
instead heed the words of Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston regarding
the emerging and converging, human-driven global challenges that loom
ominously before humankind in our time, “we’ve got to make sure that
population is recognized…. as a multiplier of many others. We’ve got
to make sure that population really does peak out when we hope it
will.”
Sir John goes on, “what we want to do is to see the issue of
population in the open, dispassionately discussed…. and then we’ll
see where it goes.”
In what is admittedly a feeble effort to help John Sulston fulfill his
charge to examine all available scientific evidence regarding human
population dynamics, please give careful consideration to the
following presentation and then take time to rigorously scrutinize the
not yet overthrown science from Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel
regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation.
http://www.panearth.org/GPSO.htm
Please accept this invitation to discern the best available science of
human population dynamics and human overpopulation; discover the
facts; deliberate; draw logical conclusions; and disseminate the
knowledge widely.
Thank you.
Steve