Update on the Status of CoML

Speech by Chairman Fred Grassle
2nd CoML All Program Meeting
Frankfurt, Germany, 4-5 November 2005

It is a pleasure to see the Census underway with a clear vision of where we are going for 2010—the most significant inventory of life ever conducted in the oceans. The major pieces of the Census are in place: HMAP provides the immediate context and demonstrates the necessity of the Census. Despite my many submersible dives into the deep sea, at yesterday’s talks I felt like I was seeing the first real glimpse of the diversity of deep-sea habitats in the combination of views from the CeDAMar, MAR-ECO, ChEss, and CoMargE projects.

CoMargE’s use of oil industry maps of surface sediment layers and near-surface features within the sediments provides the basis for intensive imaging and sampling of habitats. MAR-ECO’s wonderful multiple channel and multibeam acoustic system on the G.O. Sars reveals an entire realm of the ocean from the seafloor mountains to the converging water masses bordering major ocean basins. This new realm emerges both from the bottom up and top down, biological and spatially, through electronic images from the MAR-ECO observing system. At the All Program meeting, I was impressed by the first acoustic images of full-water-column, ocean-scale diurnal migrations.

The discoveries in ChEss are coming so rapidly that they are hard to fully assimilate. Chemosynthetic systems reveal a spatial and temporal mosaic of chemical energy from a variety of reduced compounds and sources of carbon. More comprehensive maps of these sunless, high-energy systems are beginning to emerge as the jewels surrounding the vast reservoir of biological diversity occurring on a more fine-grained spatial scale on the abyssal rise and plains.

CeDAMar, and as of their recent cruise CAML, is providing the first broad-scale, quantitative biogeography of major sea floor regions of the sea floor based on an enormous diversity of deep-sea taxa.

The 2,000 animals in 21 species tagged by TOPP are showing their own views of the ocean environment. Why did that tuna cross the Pacific three times! POST has shown the way to use of coastal observing system components to track the migrations of fish yielding surprising results such as the appearance of a stock of endangered green sturgeon appearing in an area of Western Canada.

The NaGISA sampling program will give us the first global, comprehensive generalizations about shallow-water, within-habitat biogeography. Many papers have made generalizations about latitudinal and depth trends in species diversity. Many papers show that shallow coastal, coral reef, and polar ecosystems are changing. CReefs and CMarZ, as well as NaGISA will document geographic patterns and collectively form a baseline for assessing effects of climate change.

Over the next year we will continue to make major discoveries. We will also seek agreement on a strategy to define CoML’s reporting framework and propose a transition into the Second Census of Marine Life after 2010.