Oceans Could Contain 750,000 Undiscovered Species
telegraph - Giant sea spiders the size of dinner plates. Wriggly creatures nicknamed "Squidworms" because of their strange-looking tentacles. A blind lobster whose Latin name means "terrible claw".
These are among the new types of animal discovered in the most ambitious-ever survey of the world's oceans, which concludes tomorrow with the publication of the first Census of Marine Life.
The report marks the first attempt to provide a definitive record of all the species of plants and animals living in the sea.
It will reveal that almost 250,000 have now been identified, while predicting there may be at least another 750,000 still waiting to be discovered beneath the waves.
The Census has been 10 years in the making, and during the project scientists from around the world have identified more than 6,000 new species.
Yet despite this great diversity of life, the report will warn that humans are having a devastating impact on the numbers of many species through fishing and pollution.
"Marine scientists are at present unable to provide good estimates of the total number of species that flourish in the ocean," it will say.
"It will probably take at least another decade of the Census before we can defensibly estimate the total number of marine species.
"The deep-sea floor is no longer considered a desert, characterised by a paltry diversity of species.
"Over exploitation, habitat loss and pollution have depleted many fisheries that previously provided food and employment."
More than 2,700 scientists have helped to compile the Census, with more than 540 expeditions to visit all of the world's oceans.
Among the new species discovered are Dinochelus ausubeli, the blind lobster with a long, spiny, pincer, which was found 330 yards (300 metres) below the surface in the Philippine Sea.
British scientists have made huge numbers of finds in the cold and inhospitable ocean around Antarctica. In these conditions, marine life grows larger than anywhere else in the world.
Sea spiders, a family of eight-legged creatures which rarely grow bigger than a fingernail in UK waters, have been discovered up to nine inches (23cm) across in Antarctic seas.
The deep sea floor, previously thought to be an almost lifeless desert due to the huge pressure, pitch black conditions and cold water found at depths greater than 6,000 feet (1.8km), has provided some of the biggest surprises.
Researchers have discovered huge communities of different species scattered across the ocean floor, living at the mouth of thermal vents and rifts that seep nutrients into the ocean.
Other species on the sea bed, away from vents, feed off the life that falls into the depths from the water above.
The "Squidworm", a new species of worm, was found living in the deep water of the Celebes Sea in south east Asia.
A furry crab, named the Yeti Crab or Kiwa hirsuta, was also among the discoveries when it was found beside a vent in the deep sea off Easter Island in the south Pacific. Not only was it a new species but part of a new family previously unknown to science.
Recently scientists have discovered a different member of the same family on the ocean floor off Costa Rica where cold fluid enriched with methane has been found seeping through the sea bed, sustaining colonies of animal life.
Dr Maria Baker, a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and a project manager on the Census, said: "Life is much more widespread on the ocean floor than was thought.
"We still don't know how it spreads from vent to vent, but there could be stepping stones all over the place provided by food that falls from the water above.
"The Census provides us with a baseline to measure the effects that humans are having, but it is also opening people's eyes to what are in our oceans. It is showing us that we still have no idea of exactly what we are sharing our planet with."
Genetic testing now allows scientists to work out whether newly-discovered creatures are new species or just differently-coloured or shaped varients of those already known.
One new species of crustacean, which looks like a pale shrimp, was identified in this way. The all-white creature was initially thought to be a variety of Epimeria georgiana, which has orange specks, but turned out to be new when scientists looked at its DNA.
The number of plant and animal species is also dwarfed by the possible number of different types of microbes found in the seas - up to a billion, according to the Census.
Dr Huw Griffiths, a marine scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who has gone on some of the Census expeditions, said: "About 80 per cent of the species in the Antarctic live on the sea floor. It is incredibly rich and varied there.
"They are the sort of creatures that a palaeontologist might be more likely to recognise than a marine biologist because they seem to be communities we normally see in the fossil record than in modern oceans elsewhere."
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Body Fishing in China
mcclatchydc - From his perch on an overhang above the Yellow River, Wei Jinpeng pointed to a fisherman's cove below and began counting his latest catch. He stopped after six, and guessed that perhaps a dozen human corpses were bobbing in the murky waters.
The bodies were floating facedown and tethered by ropes to the shore, their mud-covered limbs and rumps protruding from the water.
Wei is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives' corpses. Wei said he kept the faces submerged to preserve their features. Any dispute about identity makes it harder to collect his bounty.
Wei doesn't worry about how they got here, but he's heard tales over the years from relatives who've come to claim the bodies, haunting portraits of average people crushed in the extraordinary stress of China's economic boom.
While some of the 80 to 100 bodies Wei gathers each year are victims of accidents and floods, he thinks that the majority end up in the river after suicide or murder. There's no overt sign of a crime spree, though there's evidence of many people taking their own lives. Indeed, suicide is the leading cause of death for women in rural China, and 26 percent of all suicides in the world take place in the nation, according to the World Health Organization
Most of the bodies apparently are swept downriver from Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu in the country's northwest. The city boasts rows of new skyscrapers, built by a rush of poor laborers with few rights, and businessmen notorious for operating above the law.
The work of "body fishers" has received increased attention in Chinese media lately, including the release of a documentary about a clan of them who work near Wei. One English-language state newspaper described the profession as "living on the dead"; it noted that the filmmaker saw the family retrieving bodies almost daily.
Wei's fishing spot is about 18 miles from Lanzhou. A bend in the river and a hydroelectric dam slow the currents and give the bodies a place to float to the surface.
The family members who come to claim them whisper about a father who, unable to make ends meet with low pay, killed himself by jumping off a bridge. Wei also has retrieved bodies with gagged mouths and bound hands, the hallmark of criminal gangs and corrupt police. Finally, there are the remains of young women whom no one recognizes, which Wei eventually cuts loose back into the river, he said.
"Most of the bodies that are not claimed by relatives are female migrant workers who had moved to Lanzhou," said Wei, who drives a red motorcycle and wears large circle-rimmed sunglasses. "Most of them have been murdered. ... Their families don't know; they think they're still working in Lanzhou."
The families who are left to search for the deceased often do so without much help from the police and, instead, have to haggle with men such as Wei over the price of the dead.
A Lanzhou business journal wrote in 2006 about a local firm that got a call from a body fisher who'd found a corpse floating in the river with employee identification. When a company representative, identified only by the surname Wang, went to collect the body, he was told that it would cost 200 yuan (about $30) to view the face and 6,000 yuan ($895) to take the dead man away. Wang and the body fisher argued, finally settling on 4,000 yuan ($597). The news article expressed outrage at the situation and quoted police as saying there'd be a crackdown, something that almost four years later has yet to happen.
Body fishing is by all accounts a thriving business in Gansu province; practitioners advertise their names and phone numbers by painting them on the sides of buildings near the river. Chinese newspapers and news websites have run stories recently about body fishers working from the southwest mega-city of Chonqing to the eastern coastal province of Shandong.
Wei and others said they called the police when they'd found murder victims, though it isn't clear that's always the case.
"They're not only making a business from this, but they're cheating people," said Zhu Wenhuan, a Lanzhou man who's visited Wei twice looking for his mother after she vanished June 3.
Police in the area refused interview requests for this story.
However, Lanzhou residents and news accounts confirmed much of what Wei and his colleagues said.
For example, the wife of Lanzhou resident Zhang Daqiang went missing on May 22. On the suspicion that his wife had flung herself into the river because of problems at work, Zhang has posted fliers and made the rounds of local body fishers. In a telephone interview, he told McClatchy that his wife was facing increased pressure at work after management withheld pay and canceled holidays. She's one of three workers who've disappeared since employees at the company staged a strike in March to protest the conditions, Zhang said.
Lanzhou is a dusty outpost compared with the glitter of a Shanghai, but it anchors a province whose economic output more than doubled from 2004 to 2009. There are BMW and Audi dealerships near towering office buildings in what once was a part of the old Silk Road.
Dong Xiangrong, a Lanzhou university student, said that everyone knew the other side of that new wealth: Workers in the city of some 2 million people, especially migrants, are at times treated like cattle.
"Sometimes their bosses don't pay them, and when they go to argue, the bosses beat them and dump them in the river," Dong, 21, said with a matter-of-fact tone.
Sitting at a nearby park, the Ma brothers paused to consider the issue.
"Some employers don't pay the staff, so their employees commit suicide," said Ma Yinglong, a 55-year-old retired factory worker.
Ma Yingbao, a 44-year-old who's out of work, added: "There could be many reasons for a body to be in the river. ... Some people are under too much pressure."
Before Wei got into the business in 2003, he ran a pear orchard and made some 4,000 yuan a year. He now charges 500 yuan when a farmer comes to gather a body, 2,000 yuan if the customer has a job and 3,000 yuan when a company is covering the bill.
Wei acknowledged that some in the community criticize the work as profiting from tragedy. He pointed out that it's a job that few others are willing to do. Several people in Lanzhou agreed that without Wei and others scooping up bodies, there'd be no way to collect the dead.
Just down the road, Wei Yingquan and his two sons, who were profiled in the documentary, have diversified from sheep farming to body fishing. They charge people 300 yuan (about $45) just to turn over corpses to see whether they recognize them.
"Some people say that I am a swindler, that I am kidnapping bodies," said Wei Yingquan, a 64-year-old with tobacco-stained teeth and a grimy white sweater. Nevertheless, he said, "people come every day to look at the bodies."
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The 'Hate' Boat
nypost - A wealthy Manhattan couple was forced to walk the plank during a cruise on the Queen Mary 2 -- after getting into a bizarre fight with a fellow passenger, sources said.
Broadway producer Gloria Sher, 82, and her husband, Frederick Evans, 91, said they were ordered off the luxury liner after their obscenity-filled argument with someone they claim had made an anti-Semitic remark during a stately black-tie dinner.
The couple almost wound up stranded in a remote port in Quebec as punishment for their outburst. At the time, they were only days into the $20,000, five-week cruise.
They were eventually allowed to remain aboard for six more days after some passengers came to their defense, but they had to stay inside their cabin -- under house arrest. Even their booze was confiscated.
"I was treated with no respect and unbelievably rude and shockingly terrible," Sher said. "I've been sick ever since. It has ruined our lives. It's changed us forever."
Minutes into their meal that day, the couple said, one of their dining companions told Sher to shut up, then added, "There are too many Jews on board."
Sher, who is Jewish, admits she got angry, shooting back, "F- - k you!" and "How dare you insult me!" before storming off to her stateroom.
The next morning, the ship's captain, Commodore Bernard Warner, knocked on the couple's cabin door.
"You insulted a fellow passenger. I'm going to have to ask you to leave the ship," he said, quoting from a manual.
The couple, who met aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1991 and knew Warner from several trips on the QM2, were stunned, especially when he insinuated that the 95-pound Sher had pushed someone.
"He told two seniors we had to get off in Quebec and make our way home," said Sher, who produced the Tony-nominated musical "Shenandoah." "We begged him not to do this."
Evans, a former British navy man, said the commodore acted like a modern-day Captain Bligh, refusing to even listen to their side of the story.
But one passenger told The Post that the couple was at least partly to blame. Sher tends to get belligerent when drinking, the passenger said, recalling that she went on a rant one night because a lounge's piano was closed.
Another passenger, however, felt that the couple was definitely mistreated. Fred Bangasser, a retired Army colonel from Austin, Texas, who had befriended them during the cruise, tried to intervene when the commodore was giving them the heave-ho.
"This is deplorable," Bangasser said. "I felt that they were absolutely treated without appropriate dignity."
Warner allowed them to stay on board until the ship returned to New York, but only if they agreed not to leave their room.
The elderly couple spent six days as shut-ins, although they did manage to slip out of their suite once in a while.
It was hardly the royal treatment for two people known to make bold claims. Sher, for example, likes to tell people that her hubby is the illegitimate son of the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King Edward VIII, as well as a British knight. Neither claim could be confirmed.
And she has her own colorful past. Her former husband, Louis K. Sher, owned a chain of art-house movie theaters and produced "The Stewardesses," a 1969 3-D soft-core porn flick.
The Cunard cruise line -- which would refund the couple only $839 -- said in a statement that "Sir Evans and Lady Sher engaged in multiple incidences of disrespectful and disruptive behavior towards crew members and other guests."
The statement added that Cunard "fully supported" the captain's decision.
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UK Mission to Find Alien Life in Earth’s Atmosphere
metro - In a joint £60,000 venture with the European Space Agency, British boffins will send a balloon 21 miles up above the Arctic this week to look for alien micro-organisms.
The device will Hoover up the air in the stratosphere through a series of filters, which will then be sealed for analysis back on terra firma.
Clara Juanes-Vallejo, who is directing the Cranfield University research team, said: ‘There are theories that life on Earth came from space, so we need to know that life can survive the conditions of space for this to be true.
‘The environment in the stratosphere is very extreme. It can get down to -90 degrees C and is a near vacuum. If we know that life can survive in such an extreme environment, then it could also survive in places like Mars or on asteroids. in places like Mars or on asteroids.’
