WOODS HOLE, MASS. — The first comprehensive effort to identify and catalog every species in the world's oceans, from microbes to blue whales, is a year from completion. But early discoveries have profoundly altered understanding of life beneath the sea, senior scientists say.
New tracking tools, for example, show that some bluefin tuna migrate between Los Angeles and Yokohama, Japan; one tagged tuna crossed the Pacific three times in a year. White sharks forage even farther for food, commuting between Australia and South Africa.
Some turtles circumnavigate the Pacific, paddling from Baja to Borneo. And a gray-headed albatross -- a member of the world's most threatened family of birds -- stunned researchers when it raced around the globe in 46 days flat.
"The extent of movement and migration is way beyond what anyone had . . . even contemplated," said environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, a co-founder of the Census of Marine Life. "What we're learning is fundamentally different from what we knew before."
Since the $650-million, decade-long project began in May 2000, researchers have used deep-sea robots, laser-based radar and super-sensitive sonar that can track fish 90 miles away.
Census teams also embarked on about 400 shipboard expeditions. They discovered life forms faster than they could verify and name -- more than 5,600 suspected new species so far, many from the hottest, coldest, saltiest and deepest parts of the oceans.
They also found a very old species, a shrimp that textbooks said had been extinct for 50 million years. The five-inch specimen, with big eyes and red spots, was found swimming a mile beneath the ocean off northeast Australia.
"It recalls the time, hundreds of years ago, when science really was about voyages of discovery," said Laurence Madin, director of research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the world's largest private, nonprofit center for marine science.
Nine years of field study -- on tropical reefs and under polar caps, on the sea floor and in the surf -- has led to sharp reappraisals of how the world works and how it is changing. Some scientists compare the search for biodiversity to the successful effort to map the human genome.
"We're taking stock for the first time on what lives in the ocean," said Poul Holm, a marine historian at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. "That is of fundamental importance to life on Earth and to human existence."
