• Question: how species do you think are in the sea?

    Asked by miabrady to Steve, Samaneh, Jess, Colin, Christina on 14 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      Millions and millions probably.

      There is so much stuff down there that we’ve even found things we thought went extinct millions of years ago. In 1938 (confession, had to look up the year!) a fisherman caught a coelacanth (see-le-kanth) in Mozambique in Africa. Coelacanths were though to have been exinct for 65 million years before then, it would be as if someone went into the jungle and found a still living dinosaur! Oceans are huge, there’s so many places to hide who knows what we might find.

    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      Hi Mia!

      I’m not a biologist but I just had a look at the internet which knows everything, and a few years ago they started a project to count how many species there are in the sea – apparently 230,000 and counting!

      But as Steven says, there is so much of the ocean which is not yet explored that this could be only a small fraction of the all the species there are…

      here’s the link to the article about the project to count species:
      http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14206-how-many-species-live-in-the-sea.html#.Ubsl-5z3OT0

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