The census of marine life is a ten-year program to try and uncover as much as we can about diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the ocean.

 

A portion of this project, the census of hard-to-see marine life focused on the smallest sea creatures and found them in spectacular abundance. 

 

There was one sampling effort in the South Atlantic that we sampled an area about the size of the small bathroom and we found similar hundred species of just crustaceans, most of which were new to the science.

 

Huge numbers of rarely seen species are coming to light and scientists are gaining a new understanding of the dynamics of a microbial world on which all other life depends. 

 

The microbes actually play a very key role in the way the nutrients move through the ocean. And if they weren't there, the ocean would shut down very quickly and the planet would shut down very quickly.

 

Census explorers recently found that microbes form mats on the seafloor of the west coast of South America. These mats rank among earth's largest masses of life and cover a surface comparable in size to Greece. Amazingly, census of marine life estimates that all microbes in the global ocean collectively weigh the equivalent of 240 billion African elephants. Although the census has learned over the last ten years about hard-to-see creatures and all the animals that live in the world's oceans will be formally released in October 2010, the results of this massive effort will give scientists an unprecedented new understanding of life in the world ocean.