0:00:00.000,0:00:03.000
The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet.

0:00:03.000,0:00:05.000
And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right

0:00:05.000,0:00:08.000
when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet

0:00:08.000,0:00:10.000
Planet Ocean.

0:00:10.000,0:00:12.000
And the oceans are hugely productive,

0:00:12.000,0:00:14.000
as you can see by the satellite image

0:00:14.000,0:00:16.000
of photosynthesis, the production of new life.

0:00:16.000,0:00:19.000
In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth

0:00:19.000,0:00:22.000
as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe.

0:00:22.000,0:00:25.000
In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth,

0:00:25.000,0:00:27.000
and much of it we don't know about.

0:00:27.000,0:00:29.000
But I'll tell you some of that today.

0:00:29.000,0:00:31.000
That also doesn't even get into the whole protein extraction

0:00:31.000,0:00:33.000
that we do from the ocean.

0:00:33.000,0:00:35.000
That's about 10 percent of our global needs

0:00:35.000,0:00:38.000
and 100 percent of some island nations.

0:00:38.000,0:00:40.000
If you were to descend

0:00:40.000,0:00:42.000
into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable,

0:00:42.000,0:00:44.000
it would quickly become pitch black,

0:00:44.000,0:00:46.000
interrupted only by pinpoints of light

0:00:46.000,0:00:48.000
from bioluminescent organisms.

0:00:48.000,0:00:50.000
And if you turn the lights on,

0:00:50.000,0:00:52.000
you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by,

0:00:52.000,0:00:54.000
because those are the denizens of the deep,

0:00:54.000,0:00:56.000
the things that live in the deep ocean.

0:00:56.000,0:00:59.000
And eventually, the deep sea floor would come into view.

0:00:59.000,0:01:02.000
This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface

0:01:02.000,0:01:04.000
than all other habitats combined.

0:01:04.000,0:01:06.000
And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars

0:01:06.000,0:01:08.000
than we do about this habitat,

0:01:08.000,0:01:10.000
despite the fact that we have yet to extract

0:01:10.000,0:01:13.000
a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water

0:01:13.000,0:01:15.000
from those bodies.

0:01:15.000,0:01:17.000
And so 10 years ago,

0:01:17.000,0:01:20.000
an international program began called the Census of Marine Life,

0:01:20.000,0:01:22.000
which set out to try and improve our understanding

0:01:22.000,0:01:24.000
of life in the global oceans.

0:01:24.000,0:01:27.000
It involved 17 different projects around the world.

0:01:27.000,0:01:29.000
As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects.

0:01:29.000,0:01:32.000
And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage

0:01:32.000,0:01:34.000
that it managed to achieve.

0:01:34.000,0:01:36.000
It all began when two scientists, Fred Grassle and Jesse Ausubel,

0:01:36.000,0:01:39.000
met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts

0:01:39.000,0:01:41.000
where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute.

0:01:41.000,0:01:44.000
And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity

0:01:44.000,0:01:47.000
and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it.

0:01:47.000,0:01:49.000
Well, from that discussion grew this program

0:01:49.000,0:01:51.000
that involved 2,700 scientists

0:01:51.000,0:01:53.000
from more than 80 countries around the world

0:01:53.000,0:01:56.000
who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions

0:01:56.000,0:01:59.000
at a combined cost of 650 million dollars

0:01:59.000,0:02:01.000
to study the distribution, diversity and abundance

0:02:01.000,0:02:04.000
of life in the global ocean.

0:02:04.000,0:02:06.000
And so what did we find?

0:02:06.000,0:02:08.000
We found spectacular new species,

0:02:08.000,0:02:11.000
the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked --

0:02:11.000,0:02:13.000
from the shoreline to the abyss,

0:02:13.000,0:02:16.000
form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between.

0:02:16.000,0:02:19.000
And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life,

0:02:19.000,0:02:21.000
but rather the taxonomic specialists

0:02:21.000,0:02:23.000
who can identify and catalog these species

0:02:23.000,0:02:25.000
that became the limiting step.

0:02:25.000,0:02:28.000
They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves.

0:02:28.000,0:02:30.000
There are actually four to five new species

0:02:30.000,0:02:32.000
described everyday for the oceans.

0:02:32.000,0:02:35.000
And as I say, it could be a much larger number.

0:02:35.000,0:02:38.000
Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada --

0:02:38.000,0:02:40.000
It's an island off the east coast of that continent --

0:02:40.000,0:02:43.000
where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters

0:02:43.000,0:02:45.000
in human history.

0:02:45.000,0:02:47.000
And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish.

0:02:47.000,0:02:49.000
It's around 1900.

0:02:49.000,0:02:51.000
Now, when I was a boy of about his age,

0:02:51.000,0:02:53.000
I would go out fishing with my grandfather

0:02:53.000,0:02:55.000
and we would catch fish about half that size.

0:02:55.000,0:02:57.000
And I thought that was the norm,

0:02:57.000,0:02:59.000
because I had never seen fish like this.

0:02:59.000,0:03:02.000
If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed,

0:03:02.000,0:03:05.000
if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge,

0:03:05.000,0:03:07.000
it would be half that size still.

0:03:07.000,0:03:10.000
So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines.

0:03:10.000,0:03:12.000
Our expectations of what the oceans can produce

0:03:12.000,0:03:14.000
is something that we don't really appreciate

0:03:14.000,0:03:17.000
because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes.

0:03:17.000,0:03:20.000
Now most of us, and I would say me included,

0:03:20.000,0:03:22.000
think that human exploitation of the oceans

0:03:22.000,0:03:24.000
really only became very serious

0:03:24.000,0:03:26.000
in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so.

0:03:26.000,0:03:28.000
The census actually tried to look back in time,

0:03:28.000,0:03:31.000
using every source of information they could get their hands on.

0:03:31.000,0:03:33.000
And so anything from restaurant menus

0:03:33.000,0:03:35.000
to monastery records to ships' logs

0:03:35.000,0:03:37.000
to see what the oceans looked like.

0:03:37.000,0:03:39.000
Because science data really goes back

0:03:39.000,0:03:41.000
to, at best, World War II, for the most part.

0:03:41.000,0:03:43.000
And so what they found, in fact,

0:03:43.000,0:03:45.000
is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans.

0:03:45.000,0:03:48.000
And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration.

0:03:48.000,0:03:50.000
So fishermen could only catch

0:03:50.000,0:03:52.000
what they could either eat or sell that day.

0:03:52.000,0:03:54.000
But the Romans developed salting.

0:03:54.000,0:03:56.000
And with salting,

0:03:56.000,0:03:59.000
it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances.

0:03:59.000,0:04:02.000
And so began industrial fishing.

0:04:02.000,0:04:05.000
And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have

0:04:05.000,0:04:07.000
of what sort of loss we've had

0:04:07.000,0:04:10.000
relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean.

0:04:10.000,0:04:12.000
They range from 65 to 98 percent

0:04:12.000,0:04:14.000
for these major groups of organisms,

0:04:14.000,0:04:16.000
as shown in the dark blue bars.

0:04:16.000,0:04:19.000
Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect --

0:04:19.000,0:04:21.000
for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds --

0:04:21.000,0:04:23.000
there is some recovery.

0:04:23.000,0:04:25.000
So it's not all hopeless.

0:04:25.000,0:04:28.000
But for the most part, we've gone from salting to exhausting.

0:04:28.000,0:04:30.000
Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one.

0:04:30.000,0:04:33.000
It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida.

0:04:33.000,0:04:36.000
And so this is a photograph from the 1950s.

0:04:36.000,0:04:38.000
I want you to notice the scale on the slide,

0:04:38.000,0:04:40.000
because when you see the same picture from the 1980s,

0:04:40.000,0:04:42.000
we see the fish are much smaller

0:04:42.000,0:04:44.000
and we're also seeing a change

0:04:44.000,0:04:46.000
in terms of the composition of those fish.

0:04:46.000,0:04:48.000
By 2007, the catch was actually laughable

0:04:48.000,0:04:50.000
in terms of the size for a trophy fish.

0:04:50.000,0:04:52.000
But this is no laughing matter.

0:04:52.000,0:04:54.000
The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity

0:04:54.000,0:04:57.000
and we're responsible for it.

0:04:57.000,0:04:59.000
So what's left? Actually quite a lot.

0:04:59.000,0:05:02.000
There's a lot of exciting things, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them.

0:05:02.000,0:05:04.000
And I want to start with a bit on technology,

0:05:04.000,0:05:06.000
because, of course, this is a TED Conference

0:05:06.000,0:05:08.000
and you want to hear something on technology.

0:05:08.000,0:05:10.000
So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean

0:05:10.000,0:05:12.000
are remotely operated vehicles.

0:05:12.000,0:05:15.000
So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor

0:05:15.000,0:05:18.000
where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom.

0:05:18.000,0:05:21.000
So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise

0:05:21.000,0:05:24.000
and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict.

0:05:24.000,0:05:27.000
But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home

0:05:27.000,0:05:30.000
with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand,

0:05:30.000,0:05:32.000
and I could tell the pilot, "I want a sample right there."

0:05:32.000,0:05:34.000
And that's exactly what the pilot did for me.

0:05:34.000,0:05:37.000
That's the sort of technology that's available today

0:05:37.000,0:05:39.000
that really wasn't available even a decade ago.

0:05:39.000,0:05:41.000
So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats

0:05:41.000,0:05:43.000
that are very far from the surface

0:05:43.000,0:05:45.000
and very far from light.

0:05:45.000,0:05:48.000
And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans

0:05:48.000,0:05:50.000
is acoustics, or sound waves.

0:05:50.000,0:05:52.000
And the advantage of sound waves

0:05:52.000,0:05:54.000
is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light.

0:05:54.000,0:05:56.000
And so we can send out sound waves,

0:05:56.000,0:05:59.000
they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back.

0:05:59.000,0:06:02.000
And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships.

0:06:02.000,0:06:04.000
One would send out sound waves that would bounce back.

0:06:04.000,0:06:06.000
They would be received by a second ship,

0:06:06.000,0:06:09.000
and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case,

0:06:09.000,0:06:11.000
of 250 billion herring

0:06:11.000,0:06:13.000
in a period of about a minute.

0:06:13.000,0:06:16.000
And that's an area about the size of Manhattan Island.

0:06:16.000,0:06:18.000
And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool,

0:06:18.000,0:06:21.000
because knowing how many fish are there is really critical.

0:06:21.000,0:06:23.000
We can also use satellite tags

0:06:23.000,0:06:25.000
to track animals as they move through the oceans.

0:06:25.000,0:06:27.000
And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe,

0:06:27.000,0:06:29.000
such as this elephant seal,

0:06:29.000,0:06:31.000
it's an opportunity to send data back to shore

0:06:31.000,0:06:34.000
and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean.

0:06:34.000,0:06:36.000
And so from that we can produce these tracks.

0:06:36.000,0:06:38.000
For example, the dark blue

0:06:38.000,0:06:40.000
shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific.

0:06:40.000,0:06:43.000
Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful,

0:06:43.000,0:06:45.000
but stick with me nonetheless.

0:06:45.000,0:06:47.000
For animals that don't surface,

0:06:47.000,0:06:49.000
we have something called pop-up tags,

0:06:49.000,0:06:52.000
which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets.

0:06:52.000,0:06:54.000
And then at some period of time

0:06:54.000,0:06:57.000
it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore.

0:06:57.000,0:07:00.000
Because GPS doesn't work under water. That's why we need these tools.

0:07:00.000,0:07:03.000
And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways,

0:07:03.000,0:07:05.000
these hot spots in the ocean,

0:07:05.000,0:07:07.000
that should be real priority areas

0:07:07.000,0:07:09.000
for ocean conservation.

0:07:09.000,0:07:11.000
Now one of the other things that you may think about

0:07:11.000,0:07:14.000
is that, when you go to the supermarket and you buy things, they're scanned.

0:07:14.000,0:07:16.000
And so there's a barcode on that product

0:07:16.000,0:07:19.000
that tells the computer exactly what the product is.

0:07:19.000,0:07:22.000
Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding.

0:07:22.000,0:07:24.000
And what barcoding does

0:07:24.000,0:07:26.000
is use a specific gene called CO1

0:07:26.000,0:07:29.000
that's consistent within a species, but varies among species.

0:07:29.000,0:07:31.000
And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify

0:07:31.000,0:07:33.000
which species are which

0:07:33.000,0:07:35.000
even if they look similar to each other,

0:07:35.000,0:07:37.000
but may be biologically quite different.

0:07:37.000,0:07:39.000
Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this

0:07:39.000,0:07:42.000
is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City,

0:07:42.000,0:07:44.000
who worked with the census.

0:07:44.000,0:07:47.000
They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City

0:07:47.000,0:07:49.000
and they barcoded it.

0:07:49.000,0:07:51.000
Well what they found was mislabeled fish.

0:07:51.000,0:07:53.000
So for example,

0:07:53.000,0:07:55.000
they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable,

0:07:55.000,0:07:58.000
was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish.

0:07:58.000,0:08:00.000
They also found an endangered species

0:08:00.000,0:08:02.000
sold as a common one.

0:08:02.000,0:08:04.000
So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with

0:08:04.000,0:08:07.000
and also what we're eating.

0:08:07.000,0:08:09.000
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System

0:08:09.000,0:08:11.000
is the database for all the census data.

0:08:11.000,0:08:14.000
It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish.

0:08:14.000,0:08:17.000
And it contains all the data from the census

0:08:17.000,0:08:19.000
plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute.

0:08:19.000,0:08:21.000
And so what you can do with that

0:08:21.000,0:08:24.000
is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans.

0:08:24.000,0:08:26.000
What I've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand.

0:08:26.000,0:08:29.000
This is where our sampling effort has concentrated.

0:08:29.000,0:08:31.000
Now what you can see

0:08:31.000,0:08:33.000
is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic,

0:08:33.000,0:08:35.000
in the North Sea in particular,

0:08:35.000,0:08:37.000
and also the east coast of North America fairly well.

0:08:37.000,0:08:40.000
That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region.

0:08:40.000,0:08:42.000
The cold colors, the blue and the black,

0:08:42.000,0:08:44.000
show areas where we have almost no data.

0:08:44.000,0:08:46.000
So even after a 10-year census,

0:08:46.000,0:08:49.000
there are large areas that still remain unexplored.

0:08:49.000,0:08:52.000
Now there are a group of scientists living in Texas, working in the Gulf of Mexico

0:08:52.000,0:08:54.000
who decided really as a labor of love

0:08:54.000,0:08:56.000
to pull together all the knowledge they could

0:08:56.000,0:08:58.000
about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico.

0:08:58.000,0:09:01.000
And so they put this together, a list of all the species,

0:09:01.000,0:09:03.000
where they're known to occur,

0:09:03.000,0:09:06.000
and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise.

0:09:06.000,0:09:09.000
But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill.

0:09:09.000,0:09:11.000
So all of a sudden, this labor of love

0:09:11.000,0:09:14.000
for no obvious economic reason

0:09:14.000,0:09:16.000
has become a critical piece of information

0:09:16.000,0:09:19.000
in terms of how that system is going to recover, how long it will take

0:09:19.000,0:09:21.000
and how the lawsuits

0:09:21.000,0:09:24.000
and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years

0:09:24.000,0:09:27.000
are likely to be resolved.

0:09:27.000,0:09:29.000
So what did we find?

0:09:29.000,0:09:31.000
Well, I could stand here for hours, but, of course, I'm not allowed to do that.

0:09:31.000,0:09:33.000
But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries

0:09:33.000,0:09:35.000
from the census.

0:09:35.000,0:09:38.000
So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity?

0:09:38.000,0:09:41.000
Where do we find the most species of ocean life?

0:09:41.000,0:09:43.000
And what we find if we plot up the well-known species

0:09:43.000,0:09:45.000
is this sort of a distribution.

0:09:45.000,0:09:47.000
And what we see is that for coastal tags,

0:09:47.000,0:09:49.000
for those organisms that live near the shoreline,

0:09:49.000,0:09:51.000
they're most diverse in the tropics.

0:09:51.000,0:09:53.000
This is something we've actually known for a while,

0:09:53.000,0:09:55.000
so it's not a real breakthrough.

0:09:55.000,0:09:57.000
What is really exciting though

0:09:57.000,0:09:59.000
is that the oceanic tags, or the ones that live far from the coast,

0:09:59.000,0:10:01.000
are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes.

0:10:01.000,0:10:04.000
This is the sort of data, again, that managers could use

0:10:04.000,0:10:07.000
if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve.

0:10:07.000,0:10:10.000
You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale.

0:10:10.000,0:10:13.000
And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable.

0:10:13.000,0:10:16.000
Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census

0:10:16.000,0:10:18.000
are things that are small and hard to see,

0:10:18.000,0:10:20.000
that certainly wasn't always the case.

0:10:20.000,0:10:22.000
For example, while it's hard to believe

0:10:22.000,0:10:24.000
that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists,

0:10:24.000,0:10:26.000
it did until a few years ago

0:10:26.000,0:10:29.000
when South African fishermen requested an export permit

0:10:29.000,0:10:32.000
and scientists realized that this was something new to science.

0:10:32.000,0:10:34.000
Similarly this Golden V kelp

0:10:34.000,0:10:36.000
collected in Alaska just below the low water mark

0:10:36.000,0:10:38.000
is probably a new species.

0:10:38.000,0:10:40.000
Even though it's three meters long,

0:10:40.000,0:10:42.000
it actually, again, eluded science.

0:10:42.000,0:10:45.000
Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length.

0:10:45.000,0:10:48.000
But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,

0:10:48.000,0:10:50.000
so it was a lot harder to find.

0:10:50.000,0:10:53.000
But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things.

0:10:53.000,0:10:56.000
This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp,

0:10:56.000,0:10:58.000
it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago --

0:10:58.000,0:11:00.000
at least it was, until the census discovered

0:11:00.000,0:11:03.000
it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia.

0:11:03.000,0:11:06.000
And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness,

0:11:06.000,0:11:08.000
can hide secrets for a very long time.

0:11:08.000,0:11:11.000
So, Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out.

0:11:11.000,0:11:14.000
If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically.

0:11:14.000,0:11:17.000
And so one of the records that we had

0:11:17.000,0:11:20.000
was this sooty shearwater, which undergoes these spectacular migrations

0:11:20.000,0:11:22.000
all the way from New Zealand

0:11:22.000,0:11:24.000
all the way up to Alaska and back again

0:11:24.000,0:11:26.000
in search of endless summer

0:11:26.000,0:11:28.000
as they complete their life cycles.

0:11:28.000,0:11:30.000
We also talked about the White Shark Cafe.

0:11:30.000,0:11:33.000
This is a location in the Pacific where white shark converge.

0:11:33.000,0:11:35.000
We don't know why they converge there, we simply don't know.

0:11:35.000,0:11:37.000
That's a question for the future.

0:11:37.000,0:11:39.000
One of the things that we're taught in high school

0:11:39.000,0:11:42.000
is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive.

0:11:42.000,0:11:45.000
Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size,

0:11:45.000,0:11:47.000
not terribly charismatic.

0:11:47.000,0:11:49.000
But it was only discovered in the early 1980s.

0:11:49.000,0:11:51.000
But the really interesting thing about it

0:11:51.000,0:11:54.000
is that, a few years ago, census scientists discovered

0:11:54.000,0:11:56.000
that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments

0:11:56.000,0:11:58.000
in the deep Mediterranean Sea.

0:11:58.000,0:12:00.000
So now they know that, in fact,

0:12:00.000,0:12:02.000
animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them,

0:12:02.000,0:12:05.000
and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions.

0:12:05.000,0:12:08.000
If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean,

0:12:08.000,0:12:10.000
this is what you'd be left behind with,

0:12:10.000,0:12:12.000
and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor.

0:12:12.000,0:12:15.000
Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles

0:12:15.000,0:12:18.000
and not much biomass in between.

0:12:18.000,0:12:20.000
We found life in the extremes.

0:12:20.000,0:12:22.000
And so there were new species that were found

0:12:22.000,0:12:24.000
that live inside ice

0:12:24.000,0:12:26.000
and help to support an ice-based food web.

0:12:26.000,0:12:28.000
And we also found this spectacular yeti crab

0:12:28.000,0:12:31.000
that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island.

0:12:31.000,0:12:33.000
And this particular species

0:12:33.000,0:12:36.000
really captured the public's attention.

0:12:36.000,0:12:39.000
We also found the deepest vents known yet -- 5,000 meters --

0:12:39.000,0:12:42.000
the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius --

0:12:42.000,0:12:44.000
vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic

0:12:44.000,0:12:46.000
where none had been found before.

0:12:46.000,0:12:49.000
So even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable.

0:12:49.000,0:12:51.000
Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many.

0:12:51.000,0:12:53.000
And I'm just going to summarize just a few of them

0:12:53.000,0:12:55.000
very quickly for you.

0:12:55.000,0:12:58.000
First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea?

0:12:58.000,0:13:00.000
We actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean

0:13:00.000,0:13:02.000
other than marine mammals.

0:13:02.000,0:13:05.000
And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery

0:13:05.000,0:13:08.000
how many more species we're likely to discover.

0:13:08.000,0:13:10.000
And from that, we actually calculate

0:13:10.000,0:13:13.000
that we know about 16,500 marine species

0:13:13.000,0:13:15.000
and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go.

0:13:15.000,0:13:17.000
So we've done pretty well.

0:13:17.000,0:13:19.000
We've got about 75 percent of the fish,

0:13:19.000,0:13:21.000
maybe as much as 90 percent.

0:13:21.000,0:13:24.000
But the fishes, as I say, are the best known.

0:13:24.000,0:13:27.000
So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms.

0:13:27.000,0:13:29.000
Now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper

0:13:29.000,0:13:32.000
that's going to come out in the journal PLoS Biology.

0:13:32.000,0:13:34.000
And what is does is predict how many more species there are

0:13:34.000,0:13:36.000
on land and in the ocean.

0:13:36.000,0:13:38.000
And what they found

0:13:38.000,0:13:41.000
is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean.

0:13:41.000,0:13:43.000
That means 91 percent, even after the census,

0:13:43.000,0:13:45.000
still remain to be discovered.

0:13:45.000,0:13:47.000
And so that turns out to be about two million species

0:13:47.000,0:13:49.000
once all is said and done.

0:13:49.000,0:13:51.000
So we still have quite a lot of work to do

0:13:51.000,0:13:53.000
in terms of unknowns.

0:13:53.000,0:13:55.000
Now this bacterium

0:13:55.000,0:13:58.000
is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile.

0:13:58.000,0:14:00.000
And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece.

0:14:00.000,0:14:03.000
And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.

0:14:03.000,0:14:06.000
But you can imagine the biomass that represents.

0:14:06.000,0:14:08.000
But the really intriguing thing about the microbes

0:14:08.000,0:14:10.000
is just how diverse they are.

0:14:10.000,0:14:12.000
A single drop of seawater

0:14:12.000,0:14:14.000
could contain 160 different types of microbes.

0:14:14.000,0:14:16.000
And the oceans themselves

0:14:16.000,0:14:19.000
are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types.

0:14:19.000,0:14:22.000
So that's really exciting. What are they all doing out there?

0:14:22.000,0:14:24.000
We actually don't know.

0:14:24.000,0:14:26.000
The most exciting thing, I would say, about this census

0:14:26.000,0:14:28.000
is the role of global science.

0:14:28.000,0:14:30.000
And so as we see in this image of light during the night,

0:14:30.000,0:14:32.000
there are lots of areas of the Earth

0:14:32.000,0:14:35.000
where human development is much greater

0:14:35.000,0:14:37.000
and other areas where it's much less,

0:14:37.000,0:14:39.000
but between them we see large dark areas

0:14:39.000,0:14:41.000
of relatively unexplored ocean.

0:14:41.000,0:14:43.000
The other point I'd like to make about this

0:14:43.000,0:14:45.000
is that this ocean's interconnected.

0:14:45.000,0:14:47.000
Marine organisms do not care about international boundaries;

0:14:47.000,0:14:49.000
they move where they will.

0:14:49.000,0:14:52.000
And so the importance then of global collaboration

0:14:52.000,0:14:54.000
becomes all the more important.

0:14:54.000,0:14:56.000
We've lost a lot of paradise.

0:14:56.000,0:14:59.000
For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea

0:14:59.000,0:15:01.000
are now effectively gone.

0:15:01.000,0:15:04.000
There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean,

0:15:04.000,0:15:06.000
which collected more garbage than they did animals.

0:15:06.000,0:15:09.000
And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be

0:15:09.000,0:15:11.000
among the most pristine left on Earth.

0:15:11.000,0:15:13.000
And there are a lot of other pressures.

0:15:13.000,0:15:16.000
Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with,

0:15:16.000,0:15:19.000
as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs.

0:15:19.000,0:15:22.000
On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes,

0:15:22.000,0:15:24.000
we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs.

0:15:24.000,0:15:27.000
And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited,

0:15:27.000,0:15:29.000
going through this litany of concerns about the ocean,

0:15:29.000,0:15:31.000
but I want to end on a more positive note.

0:15:31.000,0:15:33.000
And so the grand challenge then

0:15:33.000,0:15:35.000
is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left,

0:15:35.000,0:15:37.000
because there is still spectacular beauty.

0:15:37.000,0:15:39.000
And the oceans are so productive,

0:15:39.000,0:15:42.000
there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans

0:15:42.000,0:15:45.000
that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective,

0:15:45.000,0:15:47.000
try to do better than we have in the past.

0:15:47.000,0:15:49.000
So we need to recognize those hot spots

0:15:49.000,0:15:51.000
and do our best to protect them.

0:15:51.000,0:15:53.000
When we look at pictures like this, they take our breath away,

0:15:53.000,0:15:55.000
in addition to helping to give us breath

0:15:55.000,0:15:57.000
by the oxygen that the oceans provide.

0:15:57.000,0:16:00.000
Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold,

0:16:00.000,0:16:02.000
they worked under water and they worked above water

0:16:02.000,0:16:04.000
trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery,

0:16:04.000,0:16:06.000
the still vast unknown,

0:16:06.000,0:16:09.000
the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life.

0:16:09.000,0:16:12.000
So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile,

0:16:12.000,0:16:15.000
whether you're a stockbroker in New York City

0:16:15.000,0:16:17.000
or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh,

0:16:17.000,0:16:19.000
the oceans matter.

0:16:19.000,0:16:21.000
And as the oceans go so shall we.

0:16:21.000,0:16:23.000
Thanks for listening.

0:16:23.000,0:16:25.000
(Applause)