Feb 24, 2020 06:46 PM
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/less-...ntifiable/
EXCERPT: . . . Nine hundred hours of deep-sea video footage has revealed a lot about how little we understand the abyssal ocean. Researchers scrutinizing the footage, taken around Pacific islands such as Hawai‘i, have concluded that they only recognize roughly a fifth of the creatures caught on the recordings.
The research, presented at a scientific meeting in San Diego, California this week, gives a clear sense of just how mysterious the deep sea really is. “There’s a lot left to discover,” says biologist Randi Rotjan of Boston University in Massachusetts, who coauthored the work.
It’s an often-quoted (and very true) statement that we have better maps of the moon than we do of the ocean floor. But quantifying just how mysterious the deep sea is is tricky. Most previous studies, says Rotjan, have focused on discovering new species or surveying smaller areas, and it’s hard to compile broad statistics on deep-sea life from lots of little studies done with different methodologies.
The new report is based on data from the CAPSTONE project [...] A team of experts concluded that fewer than 20 percent of the creatures spotted could be identified at the species level. Sometimes that was because the photos were too grainy or the species too small to identify without a microscope, says Rotjan. But the majority were simply unknown.... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . Nine hundred hours of deep-sea video footage has revealed a lot about how little we understand the abyssal ocean. Researchers scrutinizing the footage, taken around Pacific islands such as Hawai‘i, have concluded that they only recognize roughly a fifth of the creatures caught on the recordings.
The research, presented at a scientific meeting in San Diego, California this week, gives a clear sense of just how mysterious the deep sea really is. “There’s a lot left to discover,” says biologist Randi Rotjan of Boston University in Massachusetts, who coauthored the work.
It’s an often-quoted (and very true) statement that we have better maps of the moon than we do of the ocean floor. But quantifying just how mysterious the deep sea is is tricky. Most previous studies, says Rotjan, have focused on discovering new species or surveying smaller areas, and it’s hard to compile broad statistics on deep-sea life from lots of little studies done with different methodologies.
The new report is based on data from the CAPSTONE project [...] A team of experts concluded that fewer than 20 percent of the creatures spotted could be identified at the species level. Sometimes that was because the photos were too grainy or the species too small to identify without a microscope, says Rotjan. But the majority were simply unknown.... (MORE - details)
