Gerhard Pohle, acting executive director of the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews, New Brunswick and experts working on an international database of marine species, say that a vast world exists beneath the surface of the ocean and it still remains largely unknown to humankind. “There are an amazing amount of things, especially in the ocean, that we don’t know in terms of biodiversity,” says Pohle, who spent a decade taking part in an international Census of Marine Life, a decade-long project than concluded in 2010.
Pohle said, “It’s staggering to think that as recently as 2011 we did not know how many species there are in the world by order of magnitude. The estimates were from 3 to 100 million species globally. That was it.”
More Coastline Than Any Nation On Earth
Canada has more coastline than any other nation on Earth, with over 200,000 kilometers of coastline and territorial waters that cover more than seven million square kilometers in three different oceans.
The study states that there is an estimated one million species that make their home deep in the ocean and as many as two-thirds of them are still a mystery. A world register of marine species has cataloged 226,000 of them so far. As many as 72,000 more specimens have been collected and are waiting to be described.
What Lives In The Oceans?