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About a third of all types of fish and other marine life have been wrongly named by scientists, complicating efforts to conserve what could be a million marine species, experts said on Wednesday.

Inaugurating a World Register of Marine Species (www.marinespecies.org), they said the breadcrumb sponge, found in the North Atlantic in many shapes and colors, held the record for misleading synonyms with 56 Latin names.

"Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census," Mark Costello of the University of Auckland, co-founder of the register, said in a statement.

The register, trying to sort out a tangle of multiple Latin names for marine organisms from whales to plankton, has validated names of 122,500 species after eliminating 56,400 aliases, or 32 percent of all names reviewed.