DNA and micro life below 1,000m
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Deep ocean trawl nets new ‘bugs’
A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science.
They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish.
More species slide to extinction
Science taps into ocean secrets
New ocean species uncovered
Definitions (via Wikipedia)
The name plankton is derived from the Greek term πλαγκτον, meaning “wanderer” or “drifter”. While some forms of plankton are capable of independent movement and can swim up to several hundreds of metres vertically in a single day (a behavior called diel vertical migration), their horizontal position is primarily determined by currents in the body of water they inhabit. By definition, organisms classified as “plankton” are unable to resist ocean currents. This is in contrast to nekton organisms that can swim against the ambient flow of the water environment and control their horizontal position (e.g. squid, fish, krill and marine mammals).
Craig Venter’s Epic Voyage to Redefine the Origin of the Species
What we think of as life on this planet is only the surface layer of a vast undiscovered world. The great majority of Earth’s species are bacteria and other microorganisms. They form the bottom of the food chain and orchestrate the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients through the ecosystem. They are the dark matter of life. They may also hold the key to generating a near-infinite amount of energy, developing powerful pharmaceuticals, and cleaning up the ecological messes our species has made. But we don’t really know what they can do, because we don’t even know what they are.
Venter wants to change that. He’s circling the globe in his luxury yacht the Sorcerer II on an expedition that updates the great scientific voyages of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably Charles Darwin’s journey aboard HMS Beagle. But instead of bagging his finds in bottles and gunnysacks, Venter is capturing their DNA on filter paper and shipping it to be sequenced and analyzed at his headquarters in Rockville, Maryland.
Sea Knowledge Not Very Deep
A newly created marine science web portal containing 5.2 million records revealed for the first time that 95 percent of all observations of ocean life happen near the surface.
Though still under construction, the $9.5 million Ocean Biographic Information System, or OBIS, shows fewer than 0.1 percent of these records are from the deep sea. These results will be presented at a meeting of marine experts in Hamburg, Germany, on Nov. 29.
“Humans have explored less than 5 percent of the world’s oceans,” said Frederick Grassle of The Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, who directs the OBIS portal in New Jersey.
And much of the data collected from those explorations wasn’t widely available until OBIS was created in 2000 by the Census of Marine Life. The Census is a 10-year, $1 billion international research effort to assess the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans.
[tags]life hack, darwin, exploration, irl, science, animal[/tags]
