Census of Marine Life
The first Census of Marine Life produced the most comprehensive inventory of known marine life ever compiled and cataloged it as a basis for future research—28 million records and counting! This first baseline picture of ocean life—past, present, and future—can be used to forecast, measure, and understand changes in the global marine environment, as well as to inform the management and conservation of marine resources. The Census investigated life in the global ocean from microbes to whales, from top to bottom, from pole to pole, bringing together the world’s preeminent marine biologists, who shared ideas, data, and results. During their 10 years of discovery, Census scientists discovered new species, habitats, and connections and unlocked many of the ocean’s long-held secrets. They found and formally described more than1, 200 new marine species, with another 5,000 or more in the pipeline awaiting formal description. They discovered areas in the ocean where animals congregate, from white shark cafés in the open ocean to an evening rush hour in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to a shoal of fish the size of Manhattan off the coast of New Jersey, USA. They unearthed a rare biosphere in the microbial world, where scarce species lie in wait to become dominant if change goes their way, and found species believed to reside at both poles. While unlocking many secrets, investigators also documented long-term and widespread declines in marine life as well as resilience of the ocean in areas where recovery was apparent.
Along with secrets came surprises. The existence of giant mats of microbes, ranked among Earth’s largest masses of life, a Jurassic shrimp (Neoglyphea neocaledonica) thought to have been extinct 50 million years ago, and multi-cellular animals (three species of the animal phylum Loricifera) thriving without oxygen at sea bottom, where only microbes were thought to survive, were but a few of the astonishing discoveries over the decadal study.
Along with surprises came extremes. Census scientists, for example, uncovered the deepest, hottest, most northerly and most southerly hydrothermal “black smoker” vents known to science, found the world’s largest biotic ecosystem created by a single type of organism, and traveled along as a sooty shearwater chased endless summer on its 64,000-kilometer (40,000-mile) pole-to-pole journey. Scientists also reported the existence of everything from a giant squid to 38,000 different kinds of bacteria in a liter of seawater. The implications of these discoveries reveal the extent of the unknown.
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Oceana
Bristlemouth
Gonostomatidae is a family of deep-water marine fish, commonly named bristlemouths, lightfishes or anglemouths. It is a relatively small family, containing only eight known genera and 32 species. However, bristlemouths make up for their lack of diversity with numbers: Cyclothone, with 12 species, is thought to be (along with Vinciguerria), the most abundant vertebrate genus in the world.
The fossil record of this family dates back to the Miocene epoch, and was discovered by L. S. Berg in 1958. The fish are mostly found in the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, although the species Cyclothone microdon may be found in Arctic waters. They have elongated bodies from 2 centimetres (0.79 in) to 30 centimetres (12 in) in length. They have a number of green or red light-producing photophores aligned along the undersides of their heads or bodies. Their chief common name, bristlemouth, comes from their odd equally-sized and bristle-like teeth. Due to the depth in which they live, where very little light penetrates, the fish is typically colored black so as to hide from prey.
Hammerhead Shark
The hammerhead sharks are a group of sharks in the family Sphyrnidae, so named for the unusual and distinctive structure of their heads, which are flattened and laterally extended into a "hammer" shape called a "cephalofoil". Most hammerhead species are placed in the genus Sphyrna; some authorities place the winghead shark in its own genus, Eusphyra. Many, not necessarily mutually exclusive, functions have been proposed for the cephalofoil, including sensory reception, maneuvering, and prey manipulation. Hammerheads are found worldwide in warmer waters along coastlines and continental shelves. Unlike most sharks, hammerheads usually swim in schools. Some of these schools can be found near Malpelo Island in Colombia, the Cocos Islands by Costa Rica and near Molokai Island in Hawaii.
The nine known species range from 0.9 to 6 m (3.0 to 20 ft) long. The average hammerhead shark weighs about 500 pounds, but some may grow up to 1000. All the species have a projection of their face on all sides of the head that gives it a resemblance to a flattened hammer.
It was determined recently that the hammer-like shape of the head evolved to enhance the animal's vision. The positioning of the eyes give the shark good binocular vision, as well as 360-degree vision in the vertical plane, meaning they can see above and below them at all times. The shape of the head was previously thought to help the shark find food, aiding in close-quarters maneuverability and allowing sharp turning movement without losing stability. However, it was found that the unusual structure of its vertebrae allowed it to make the turns correctly, more often than its head. The hammer would also shift and provide lift.
Hammerheads are one of the most negatively buoyant of sharks. Like all sharks, hammerheads have electroreceptory sensory pores called ampullae of Lorenzini. By distributing the receptors over a wider area, hammerheads can sweep for prey more effectively. These sharks have been able to detect an electrical signal of half a billionth of a volt. The hammer also allows the nostrils to be placed farther apart, increasing its ability to detect chemical gradients and localize the source.
Hammerheads have disproportionately small mouths and seem to do a lot of bottom-hunting. They are also known to form schools during the day, sometimes in groups of over 100. In the evening, like other sharks, they become solitary hunters.
Hammerheads are notably one of the few animals that acquire a tan from prolonged exposure to sunlight. Tanning occurs when a hammerhead is in shallow waters or close to the surface for long periods.
Lanternfish
Lanternfishes (or myctophids, from the Greek mykter, "nose" and ophis, "serpent") are small, deep sea fish of the large family Myctophidae. One of two families in the order Myctophiformes, the Myctophidae are represented by 246 species in 33 genera, and are found in oceans worldwide. They are aptly named after their conspicuous use of bioluminescence. Their sister family, the Neoscopelidae, are much fewer in number but superficially very similar; at least one neoscopelid shares the common name 'lanternfish': the large-scaled lantern fish, Neoscopelus macrolepidotus.
Sampling via deep trawling indicates that lanternfish account for as much as 65% of all deep sea fish biomass. Indeed, lanternfish are among the most widely distributed, populous, and diverse of all vertebrates, playing an important ecological role as prey for larger organisms. With an estimated global biomass of 550 - 660 million metric tonnes, several times the entire world fisheries catch, lanternfish also account for much of the biomass responsible for the deep scattering layer of the world's oceans. In the Southern Ocean, myctophids provide an alternative food resource to krill for predators such as squid and the king penguin. Although plentiful and prolific, currently only a few commercial lanternfish fisheries exist: limited operations off South Africa, in the sub-Antarctic, and in the Gulf of Oman.
In all but one species, Taaningichthys paurolychnus, a number of photophores (light-producing organs) are present; these are paired and concentrated in ventrolateral rows on the body and head. Some may also possess specialised photophores on the caudal peduncle, in proximity to the eyes (e.g., the "headlights" of Diaphus species), and luminous patches at the base of the fins. The photophores emit a weak blue, green, or yellow light, and are known to be arranged in species-specific patterns. In some species, the pattern varies between males and females. This is true for the luminous caudal patches, with the males' being typically above the tail and the females' being below the tail.
Tube-eye Fish
The tube-eye or thread-tail, Stylephorus chordatus, is a deep-sea Stylephoriformes fish, the only fish in the genus Stylephorus and family Stylephoridae.
It is found in deep subtropical and tropical waters around the world, living at depths during the day and making nightly vertical migrations to feed on plankton. It is an extremely elongated fish: although its body grows only to 28 centimetres (11 in) long, it has a pair of tail fin rays that triple its length to about 90 centimetres (35 in). Its eyes are tubular in shape, resembling a pair of binoculars.
It has a tubular mouth through which it sucks seawater by enlarging its oral cavity to about forty times its original size. It then expels the water through the gills, leaving behind the copepods on which it feeds.
The tube-eye was previously thought to be related to Lampridiformes, a group of other bizzarre fishes. However it has now been placed in a new order, named Stylephoriformes.
Comb Jelly
The Ctenophora (pronounced /tɨˈnɒfərə/, singular ctenophore, pronounced /ˈtɛnəfɔər/ or /ˈtiːnəfɔər/), (from the Greek ctena/χτένα (comb), phero/φέρω (carry) commonly known as comb jellies, are a phylum of animals that live in marine waters worldwide. Their most distinctive feature is the "combs", groups of cilia that they use for swimming, and they are the largest animals that swim by means of cilia — adults of various species range from a few millimeters to 1.5 meters (59 in) in size. Like cnidarians, their bodies consist of a mass of jelly with one layer of cells on the outside and another lining the internal cavity. In ctenophores these layers are two cells deep while those in cnidarians are only one cell deep. Ctenophores also resemble cnidarians in having a decentralized nerve net rather than a brain. Some authors combined ctenophores and cnidarians in one phylum, Coelenterata, as both groups rely on water flow through the body cavity for both digestion and respiration. Increasing awareness of the differences persuaded more recent authors to classify them in separate phyla.
Almost all ctenophores are predators, taking prey ranging from microscopic larvae and rotifers to the adults of small crustaceans; the exceptions are juveniles of two species, which live as parasites on the salps on which adults of their species feed. In favorable circumstances ctenophores can eat ten times their own weight in a day. There are only 100–150 valid species and possibly another 25 that have not been fully described and named. The textbook examples are cydippids with egg-shaped bodies and a pair of retractable tentacles fringed with tentilla ("little tentacles") that are covered with colloblasts, sticky cells that capture prey. The phylum has a wide range of body forms, including the flattened deep-sea platyctenids, in which the adults of most species lack combs, and the coastal beroids, which lack tentacles and prey on other ctenophores by using huge mouths armed with groups of large, stiffened cilia that act as teeth. These variations enable different species to build huge populations in the same area, because they specialize in different types of prey, which they capture by as wide a range of methods as spiders use.
Despite their soft, gelatinous bodies, fossils thought to represent ctenophores, apparently with no tentacles but many more comb-rows than modern forms, have been found in lagerstätten as far back as the early Cambrian, about 525 million years ago. The position of the ctenophores in the evolutionary family tree of animals has long been debated, and the majority view at present, based on molecular phylogenetics, is that cnidarians and bilaterians are more closely related to each other than either is to ctenophores. A recent molecular phylogenetics analysis concluded that the common ancestor of all modern ctenophores was cydippid-like, and that all the modern groups appeared relatively recently, probably after the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65.5 million years ago. Evidence accumulating since the 1980s indicates that the "cydippids" are not monophyletic, in other words do not include all and only the descendants of a single common ancestor, because all the other traditional ctenophore groups are descendants of various cydippids.
Maelstrom
The original Maelstrom (described by Poe and others) is the Moskstraumen, a powerful tidal current in the Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian coast. The Maelstrom is formed by the conjunction of the strong currents that cross the Straits (Moskenstraumen) between the islands and the great amplitude of the tides. The Maelstrom’s name comes from the Dutch words malen, to crush and stroom, meaning current.
In Norwegian the most frequently used name is Moskstraumen or Moskenstraumen (current of [island] Mosken).
The fictional depictions of the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne describe it as a gigantic circular vortex that reaches the bottom of the ocean, when in fact it is a set of currents and crosscurrents with a rate of 18 km.
Two of the most notable literary references to the Lofoten Maelstrom date from the nineteenth century. The first is the Edgar Allan Poe story "A Descent into the Maelström" (1841). The second is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869), the famous novel by Jules Verne. At the end of this novel, Captain Nemo seems to commit suicide, sending his Nautilus submarine into the Maelstrom (although in Verne's sequel Nemo and Nautilus survived).
In Spanish and other languages, Maelstrom is used as a synonym for whirlpool. Hence, the word "Maelstrom" appears in diverse contexts metaphorically to make reference to different subjects or objects that suggest great chaotic or sinister forces. The word maelstrom is used to denote powerful, inescapable destructive forces.
Greek Poet Homer describes a maelstrom in his "Odyssey" as Odysseus must choose to sail near the six-headed monster Scylla, or near the whirlpool Charybdis in order to reach Ithaca.
