it’s a whole wide world under here with
some prime real estate and colorful
characters this is Australia’s Great
Barrier Reef the largest reef in the
world and it conceals many secrets which
makes it a perfect spot for the census
of marine life an ambitious decade-long
project to discover everything that
lives in the oceans from large to
microscopic project leader Julian Cayley
says researchers need to fill in the
blanks we know quite a lot about the
corals and fishes they’re quite obvious
people have been working on them for
many years but what we don’t know is a
lot about the other things that live in
amongst the corals sea voice are we
ready to go
during the census divers comb the coral
reefs off Heron Island collecting
samples some of the larger animals are
collected in traps and bags but to find
the smallest inhabitants the divers must
chisel chunks of dead coral off the
ocean bed and take them back to the lab
for identification the marine
investigation is taking place just in
time
reefs as we know are under threat
they’re under threat because of climate
change ocean acidification various forms
of use and if we have any chance of
managing those reefs effectively we need
to know what’s there in order to be able
to understand how those those reefs are
changing and whether or not we’re losing
the the biodiversity that resides on
them and whether the management that
we’re putting in place is effective
already there are sections of coral bed
off Heron Island that are dead or dying
to learn more about protecting the reef
researchers also fastened boxes to the
ocean floor
they’re called autonomous reef
monitoring systems or arms for short
creatures we’ll treat them like coral
and move right in then in a year or so
scientists will come back to collect the
boxes and study what’s taken up
residence
back to the Heron Island Lab researchers
break open the corals to find out what’s
living inside a single dead coral head
can contain more than 150 individual
crustaceans and many species of worms
and microorganisms inside the lab the
smallest creatures go under the
microscope so what I’ve been doing is
mostly collecting coral rubble and then
this is our little processing station
where we just break up the rubble and
pick out the worms that we can find so
there’s one there into alcohol and ready
to be identified under the microscope
Australia is one of more than 80
countries participating in the ambitious
census of marine life the decade-long
project will end soon but the results
are already starting to come in what
they discovered surprised even the
scientists they didn’t stumble on a
couple of new species or even dozens as
was expected
instead they discovered literally
hundreds of creatures that had never
before been identified and we’re coming
up with many many species that no one’s
ever seen before in some places we go a
particular group has never been
collected there and there was one group
that we think there is in excess of 90%
of the species we were collecting had
never been seen before the discovery of
so many new species suggests there’s
much about coral reefs that we don’t
know and reminds us
we need to protect fragile habitats or
some species may not be around for the
next great census sponsored by National
Geographic mission programs taking
science and exploration into the new
millennium
some prime real estate and colorful
characters this is Australia’s Great
Barrier Reef the largest reef in the
world and it conceals many secrets which
makes it a perfect spot for the census
of marine life an ambitious decade-long
project to discover everything that
lives in the oceans from large to
microscopic project leader Julian Cayley
says researchers need to fill in the
blanks we know quite a lot about the
corals and fishes they’re quite obvious
people have been working on them for
many years but what we don’t know is a
lot about the other things that live in
amongst the corals sea voice are we
ready to go
during the census divers comb the coral
reefs off Heron Island collecting
samples some of the larger animals are
collected in traps and bags but to find
the smallest inhabitants the divers must
chisel chunks of dead coral off the
ocean bed and take them back to the lab
for identification the marine
investigation is taking place just in
time
reefs as we know are under threat
they’re under threat because of climate
change ocean acidification various forms
of use and if we have any chance of
managing those reefs effectively we need
to know what’s there in order to be able
to understand how those those reefs are
changing and whether or not we’re losing
the the biodiversity that resides on
them and whether the management that
we’re putting in place is effective
already there are sections of coral bed
off Heron Island that are dead or dying
to learn more about protecting the reef
researchers also fastened boxes to the
ocean floor
they’re called autonomous reef
monitoring systems or arms for short
creatures we’ll treat them like coral
and move right in then in a year or so
scientists will come back to collect the
boxes and study what’s taken up
residence
back to the Heron Island Lab researchers
break open the corals to find out what’s
living inside a single dead coral head
can contain more than 150 individual
crustaceans and many species of worms
and microorganisms inside the lab the
smallest creatures go under the
microscope so what I’ve been doing is
mostly collecting coral rubble and then
this is our little processing station
where we just break up the rubble and
pick out the worms that we can find so
there’s one there into alcohol and ready
to be identified under the microscope
Australia is one of more than 80
countries participating in the ambitious
census of marine life the decade-long
project will end soon but the results
are already starting to come in what
they discovered surprised even the
scientists they didn’t stumble on a
couple of new species or even dozens as
was expected
instead they discovered literally
hundreds of creatures that had never
before been identified and we’re coming
up with many many species that no one’s
ever seen before in some places we go a
particular group has never been
collected there and there was one group
that we think there is in excess of 90%
of the species we were collecting had
never been seen before the discovery of
so many new species suggests there’s
much about coral reefs that we don’t
know and reminds us
we need to protect fragile habitats or
some species may not be around for the
next great census sponsored by National
Geographic mission programs taking
science and exploration into the new
millennium
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