The Census has also revealed many strange sea
creatures, such as upside down jellyfish.
Image: iStockphoto

The 2,000-strong community of Census of Marine Life scientists from 82 nations announced astonishing examples of recent new finds from the world’s ocean depths on 10 November 2008.

In the fourth report issued since the global collaboration began in the year 2000, Census scientists have discovered a large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean.

Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large icesheet grew, nature created a "thermohaline expressway," a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content.

Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved; some octopuses, for example, losing their defensive ink sacs – pointless at perpetually dark depths.

This revelation into the global distribution and diversity of deep sea fauna, will be published 11 November in the journal Cladistics.

During the Census the scientists have also found new forms of life such as behemoth bacteria, colossal sea stars, astonishing Antarctic amphipods and a mammoth mollusk. The report estimates that, beyond the 16,000 marine fish species already known to science, another 4,000 await discovery, many of them in the tropics.

"The release of the first Census in 2010 will be a milestone in science. After 10 years of new global research and information assembly by thousands of experts the world over, it will synthesize what humankind knows about the oceans, what we don’t know, and what we may never know – a scientific achievement of historic proportions," said Ian Poiner, chair of the Census’s International Scientific Steering Committee and Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

The Census is to be released in October 2010.