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BIODIVERSITY: O Sponge, Your Names Are Many

Stephen Leahy

KINGSTON, Ontario, Jun 25 2008 (IPS) - The Breadcrumb sponge found on floats and rocks in most oceans has been “discovered” 56 times, the first dating to 1766. And 56 different scientists over the span of 250 years have had the satisfaction and pleasure of giving the lowly sponge 56 different names.

Experts using comparative and DNA analysis have now sorted the Breadcrumb (Halichondria panicea) from all the other sponges and discovered its 55 aliases as part of the newly launched World Register of Marine Species.

Turns out there are tens of thousands of other aliases for other marine species.

So why is this important, other than setting the scientific discovery books straight?

“How can we talk about a species if we don’t know its right name?” said Ward Appeltans of the Flanders Marine Institute in Belgium where the World Registry will be housed.

“How will we know when we really have a new species without such a list?” Appeltans told IPS.

Until now there has been no scientific master list of marine species. Instead there are dozens of lists in various countries. The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is a multi-year effort to bring all those lists together, validate them and become the master list of all known marine species.

Without such a list, identifying a new species has been like “trying to find a book in a huge library without an index”, he said.

Carl Linnaeus devised a scientific system for naming species in the 1750s to sort out the common names of different fish species. What is known in French fish markets as a bulot is called a whelk in New England, buccin in Canada, and the Wellhornschnecke of the North Sea, but is universally known as Buccinum undatum by scientists. However, without a master list to compare, it was difficult to find out if a species had already been named.

“It is shocking that such no master list existed, even for corals or fishes,” said Jesse Ausubel, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, that provided some of the funding for the project.

“We’re very excited that the master list is now half complete,” Ausubel said in an interview.

The World Register now contains about 122,500 validated marine species names along with 5,600 images, hyperlinks to taxonomic literature and other information. More than 56,000 aliases like those for the Breadcrumb sponge were identified. It will be completed by October 2010 as part of the first Census of Marine Life, a decade long world-wide scientific effort to investigate life in the oceans. They estimate 230,000 marine species are known to science and that there are three times as many unknown/unnamed marine species as known, for a grand total on Earth that could surpass 1 million.

“Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census,” says Mark Costello of the University of Auckland, co-founder of WoRMS.

“This project will improve information vital to researchers investigating fisheries, invasive species, threatened species and marine ecosystem functioning, as well as to educators,” Costello said in a statement.

Regulating fisheries without an accurate and agreed on list of species is problematic and has made it difficult to prosecute illegal fishing activity in some cases. It is also critical in the understanding the scope of biodiversity in any one region, said Ausubel.

“It can make an enormous difference if there are 800 or 8,000 unique species when considering protection for a coral reef,” he said.

Thanks mainly to the Census of Marine life, more than 1,600 new species are being discovered each year, says Appeltans. However, with the master list about 200 on average turn out to be previously discovered species. Still that means 1,400 are absolutely new to science and include 100 new fish species per year.

“At this rate it will take about 500 years to identify the estimated one million as yet undescribed species in the world’s oceans,” he said.

Shortening that time span requires new technologies for sampling, image capture, data management, genetic analyses, new training programmes for taxonomists, and online initiatives such as ZooBank, which can assign “official” permanent registration identifications to new animal species.

The World Register will also be freely available on the internet and greatly facilitate species identification, especially by scientists in the developing world, said Appeltans.

“The fact that every year scientists still find more than 100 new marine fish species in the sea is astonishing,” he added. “While we are looking up to search for life on Mars, there is still so much beauty to discover at our feet.”