After a decade of studying the world's oceans, scientists published the final results of the project for the first time - ' Ocean Life Statistics ' (CoML).
A new species discovered in Elephant Island, Antarctica. (Photo: NYtimes).
According to the CoML, more than 540 ocean expeditions were conducted with the participation of 2,700 scientists from 90 countries.
The research has spent about 9,000 days floating in the sea and published about 2,600 scientific papers about their findings. Total funding for CoML implementation is up to 650 million USD.
The results show that there are about 230,000 - 250,000 marine species known in the world. Scientists estimate the number of unexplored species is 750,000.
In addition, there are about 6,000 new marine species found in the last 10 years, most notably the Yeti crabs have a lot of yellow bristles, the squid has a body length of up to 6m and the shrimp is thought to have extinction 50 million years ago.
However, Ron O'Dor, one of CoML's leading scientists, expressed: ' The early ocean is only a memory '. The greed of exploiting human marine resources has caused catastrophic impacts on species. They are in danger of extinction and they estimate that only a few sea areas are left untouched by humans.
" Large marine species - from whales to tuna - used to be abundant in the seas but by surveying they are reduced by up to 90% or more ," said Jesse H. Ausubel, co-founder. CoML project, as well as professor of environmental research at Rockefeller University, New York, USA said.
" We hope the 21st century will be an era of great recovery of ocean life ," said Ausubel.
Project: ' Ocean life statistics ' has just been set up a separate website iobis.org that any one of us wants to understand can see the distribution of a species of an ocean from a database Huge data of ' species names ' and ' addresses ' of marine creatures.