Life on earth is a mystery: Life in the oceans is an even deeper mystery.

The biggest fishing trip of all time: $1bn survey unravels mysteries of the deep
Tim Radford Guardian

A billion-dollar survey of the world's oceans has so far pinpointed 38,000 marine species - and identified new fish at the rate of two a week. The census of marine life, a concerted effort by hundreds of scientists from more than 70 nations, is in effect the first hi-tech inventory of life in the so called "blue planet". Oceans cover 70% of the globe. But marine scientists have been pointing out for years that the surface of Venus has been better mapped than the world under the oceans. The latest "end of term report" by the census scientists assembles data from more than 5.2m new and existing records, and maps the distribution of the 38,000 species. Details of the survey will be unveiled at a meeting in Hamburg next week.

Scientists in Australia, China, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand, South America and sub-Saharan Africa are to form nine new regional networks to create a new "information seaway". But the worldwide bid to probe life in the seas has hardly begun. "We have barely skimmed the surface," said Frederick Grassle, of Rutgers University in the US, who chairs the international scientific steering committee of the census. "Humans have explored less than 5% of the world's oceans, and even where we have explored, life may have been too small to see. Thus, opportunities abound to discover species and increase our knowledge of abundance and distribution." ...

Earth's uncanned crusaders: Will sardines save our skin?
Cornelia Dean New York Times

Scientists working off the west coast of Africa have identified sardines as an unexpected factor in global warming. The fish are not acting like cattle or termites, whose gassy emissions (to put it politely) add heat-trapping methane to the atmosphere. Sardines improve the situation, the researchers say. Or they might, if they were not been fished out. The scientists say that when sardines are plentiful they gobble up ocean phytoplankton, tiny plants that appear in vast numbers when ocean currents produce upwellings of deep water. But when sardines are scarce, the phytoplankton survive uneaten, only to sink to the bottom, decompose and produce methane and hydrogen sulfide gas that rise to the surface in giant clouds. Hydrogen sulfide smells like rotten eggs, can poison fish and strips oxygen from water as it moves to the surface, producing anoxic "dead zones." That's bad enough, but methane is arguably worse, at least for world climate. Pound for pound methane traps 21 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

The researchers, Dr. Andrew Bakun from the University of Miami and Dr. Scarla J. Weeks of the University of Cape Town, devised their plankton-sardine-methane theory while working off Namibia, where once-abundant sardine populations have been devastated since the 1970's by heavy fishing. They described their findings in the current issue of the journal Ecology Letters. ... Though some researchers are skeptical about linking sardines to global warming, others think that Dr. Bakun and Dr. Weeks are onto something. "This study demonstrates that overfishing of one species of fish, such as sardines, can profoundly alter an entire marine ecosystem," said Dr. Ellen Pikitch, who heads the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, which provides financial support for Dr. Bakun. ...

Inform fish-eaters of health risk, experts urge
Mort Rosenblum AP/Globe and Mail

SÈTE, FRANCE -- Each day at 4 p.m., the trawlers come back, alive with giant bass, mackerel and squirming eels, at the end of a food chain that links family dinner tables to poisons in the sea. Besides mercury, which can damage the brains of fetuses and young children and can affect healthy adults, there are PCBs, dioxins and flame retardants with unknown long-term effects.

It is the same from ancient Mediterranean towns such as Sète to big-city docks in Asia, U.S. ports on the Gulf of Mexico or harbours in seemingly pristine Nordic waters. Industrial waste permeates every ocean. Although rich in omega-3 fatty acids vital to the heart and brain, many fish contain toxic substances that build up over time in the human body. Scientists express alarm at what they call inadequate government warnings, lax attitudes toward fishing industries, and data insufficient to assess risk. The problem is that authorities are caught between wanting to inform the public while not damaging consumer confidence in a healthy food source, says Sandrine Blanchemanche, a sociologist with France's respected National Institute for Agronomic Research. ...

One of the findings of the ongoing billion dollar ocean survey: Carbon-dioxide exhausts from human industry are not just creating warmer oceans, they are gradually increasing their acidity, scientists reported in August. This could affect corals and marine shellfish - and subsequently the species that depend on them.

Noted: Canadians call for fish-farm moratorium
Elizabeth Bluemink Juneau Empire

The majority of Canada's North Coast community leaders want to quell the rise of salmon farming in their region. The Skeena-Queen Charlotte Regional District Board voted 6-3 on Friday night to ask federal Canadian and British Columbia regulators to halt new salmon farms in their 7,696-square mile district bordering Alaska's Inside Passage. The board voted it will support lifting the moratorium once the industry finds a "closed containment" technology - a proven method to keep farmed salmon from escaping into North Coast waters and competing with wild fish, said Des Nobles, the board's District A director and a vocal opponent of Britich Columbia's net-cage salmon industry. "Our whole lives are built around wild Pacific salmon," Nobles said on Monday. ... The Skeena-Queen Charlotte District includes the Queen Charlotte Islands and a stretch of mainland north and south of Prince Rupert. Major rivers include the Skeena and the Nass. ...