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Census Of Marine Life Deep Sea Octopus & More

By Jason Heller, November 9, 2008 @ 02:00 AM (EST)

As our readers know, our newest member to the DPG team is Rick Morris, from the Census of Marine life. It seems like everywhere we turn now, CoML is releasing information and images of the truly amazing learnings and discoveries that abound in the ocean.

Science Daily today posted a fairly comprehensive , yet bulleted and easy-to-read, recap of many of the findings, along with the headline story of the deep sea octopus having near shore relatives.

Photo: Census of Marine Life

Accoring the the Census of Marine Life (via Science Daily) "Within their mandate "to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans – past, present, and future,” Census of Antarctic Marine Life scientists report the first molecular evidence that a large proportion of deep sea octopus species worldwide evolved from common ancestor species that still exist in the Southern Ocean."

"Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago when, as Antarctica cooled and a large icesheet grew, nature created a “thermohaline expressway,” a northbound flow of tasty frigid water with high salt and oxygen content."

This revelation into the global distribution and diversity of deep sea fauna, to be reported Nov. 11 in the journal Cladistics, was made possible by intensive sampling during Census International Polar Year expeditions...

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