New Delhi: Till a few years ago, the Indian contribution to marine life databases was minimal. But if you were to trawl through one today, you’ll come across a slew of unmistakably “Indian” names such as Krohnitta balagopali and Sagitta meenakshiae, predatory worms named by their discoverer Vijayalakshmi Nair after her children; Kochimysis pillaii, a shrimp-like creature found in the backwaters of Kochi; and Hylascus andamanensis, a deep-sea sponge discovered in the Andaman Sea.
The hunt: Marine sampling in progress in the Indian Ocean. Loka Bharathi / National Institute of Oceanography
You won’t have to have to flip through obscure academic journals to get to them either. A database with detailed information on at least 15,000 species from India’s coasts is now accessible on the Internet. It even has DNA fingerprints or “barcodes” for at least 200 species of zooplankton, barnacles, shrimp and fish.
At least 30 new species, from mites and predatory marine worms to crabs that live around undersea volcanic vents, have been discovered in the five years that the secretariat of the Indian Ocean Census of Marine Life (IO-CoML) has been in operation.
The results of the Census of Marine Life (CoML), the first and most comprehensive survey of the world’s marine life, are going to be out in October 2010, but scientists at the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa say that the survey is already changing our understanding of life under the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Listen to an interview with Mohideen Wafar, head of the Indian Ocean Census of Marine Life
Download here
Click here to view a slideshow of photographs and images pertaining to the Census
“The idea of the census is not only to enumerate the life forms in the sea. We also want to delve into the past to find out what lived in our oceans, examine the present to see how creatures live there now, and predict the future based on current patterns of human activity,” says Mohideen Wafar, chairman, IO-CoML.
CoML is coordinated by a group of scientists based at the Consortium of Ocean Leadership in Washington, DC. Twelve regional committees, of which IO-CoML is one, are responsible for its implementation. The project has involved around 2,000 researchers from institutes and universities in 80 countries around the world.
To manage its scale and ambition, the census has been divided into 18 different programmes. Some like Census of Marine Zooplankton deal only with marine zooplankton, while others like Continental Margin Ecosystems examine the biodiversity of continental slopes, the transition zones where continents fall into deep sea. The History of Marine Animal Populations looks at historical records to see how the populations of different species have changed over millennia.