Cordova, Alaska—The number of fish in the sea, long a metaphor for limitless possibility, is finally coming to a head count. An ongoing, decadelong effort by scientists from more than 80 countries to fathom the contents of the global ocean will culminate next year in a definitive Census of Marine Life.
Inspired by the depth of human ignorance about the underwater realm, census researchers have already found what they believe are more than 5,000 previously unknown marine species. The teams have also tagged and tracked many familiar creatures, uncovering surprises to science and commercial fisheries alike. For example, California green sturgeon, once considered homebodies, actually gather each year at Vancouver Island in British Columbia before swimming another 1,500 miles to winter in Alaska.
The census encompasses an alphabet soup of projects, including ChEss (Biogeography of Deep-Water Chemosynthetic Ecosystems) and TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Predators). But, just as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, the grand scope of the Census of Marine Life can be appreciated through the study of a single species of fish—in this case, the lingcod, Ophiodon elongatus, tracked through the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project (POST). Prized by diners for its tasty white flesh, the yard-long lingcod is a voracious predator that ambushes other fish among the submerged rock pinnacles and kelp thickets of Prince William Sound. Over the past couple of decades, authorities fear, lingcod stocks in some areas along the Pacific coast have been dangerously depleted by overfishing.
