Wrong names for fish seen complicating conservation

Alister Doyle Reuters 26 Jun 08;

OSLO (Reuters) - About a third of all types of fish and other marine life have been wrongly named by scientists, complicating efforts to conserve what could be a million marine species, experts said on Wednesday.

Inaugurating a World Register of Marine Species (www.marinespecies.org), they said the breadcrumb sponge, found in the North Atlantic in many shapes and colors, held the record for misleading synonyms with 56 Latin names.

"Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census," Mark Costello of the University of Auckland, co-founder of the register, said in a statement.

The register, trying to sort out a tangle of multiple Latin names for marine organisms from whales to plankton, has validated names of 122,500 species after eliminating 56,400 aliases, or 32 percent of all names reviewed.

"For 250 years scientists have been describing species in the oceans but there is no complete list," Ward Appeltans of the Flanders Marine Institute and data manager of the register told Reuters. "We are now creating that list."

Experts at the register estimate that 230,000 species are known to science and that three times more are yet to be found, giving a final total that could exceed a million. The register hopes to give an overview of known species by October 2010.

New species get a two-word Latin name as their formal identity. But scientists often wrongly believe they have found a new species and give a new name.

The oldest name usually takes precedence, as with the breadcrumb sponge's name Halichondrea panicea given in 1766. Later names for the same sponge include Alcyonium manusdiaboli in 1794 or Trachyopsilla glaberrima in 1931.

OVER-FISHING

Getting names right is a condition for managing resources in the seas, where many species are facing threats from over-fishing, pollution and climate change. Current high food prices could put more pressure on fish stocks.

"If fish are transported it's very important that customs know exactly what's in the boxes," Appeltans said. "If you want to protect endangered species you need to...be able to identify the species."

A type of marine snail once used in the cosmetics industry, for instance, was found to be the same as one listed under another name as endangered, he said.

Among species with misleading names, the basking shark, the world's second largest fish after the whale shark, has 39 aliases in Latin, Appeltans said.

"The register...will change the way people think about biodiversity and naming species," Ron O'Dor, senior scientist of the Census of Marine Life, told Reuters.

The register is linked to the census, a 10-year effort to map life in the oceans. So far the census has added 110 validated species to the list and expects to add thousands more.

In remote parts of the oceans, such as off Antarctica, more than 80 percent of organisms caught are unknown to science especially smaller creatures such as worms, molluscs or crustaceans.

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)

Catalogue of marine life reaches 122,500
Yahoo News 26 Jun 08;

Scientists have identified some 122,500 species of marine life in the oceans and have managed to clear up some 56,000 cases of double-identity as part of a global research project.

"Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census," said Mark Costello of the University of Auckland in a statement Wednesday.

"This project will improve information vital to researchers investigating fisheries, invasive species, threatened species and marine ecosystem functioning, as well as to educators."

The new World Register of Marine Species (www.marinespecies.org) now contains about 122,500 validated marine species names, and has cleared up the aliases given to thousands of species.

"It will eliminate the misinterpretation of names, confusion over Latin spellings, redundancies and a host of other problems that sow confusion and slow scientific progress," Costello said.

Researchers aim to finish the project by October 2010.

"It adds difficulties to project like the census where we have to integrate data from different sources into one data base, because of different names to the same thing," said Edward Vanden Berghe, from the Ocean Biographic Information System at Rutgers University.

Since the middle of the 18th century when scientists first began to set up a system to name and classify plant and animal life, several different species have inadvertently been given different names.

The Breadcrumb Sponge, known by its Latin name of Halichondria panicea, was the champion of Latin aliases, collecting some 56 synonyms since its first description in 1766.

The animal which has no fixed abode and likes to float along or attach itself to rocks, smells like exploded gun-powder and is known to change its appearance.

"Animals on land or on the sea don't walk around with their names on their face," said Philippe Bouchet, professor at the Natural History Museum in Paris.

"The history of science is full of approximations, of intuitions and of errors," he told AFP.

Launched in 2000, the census aims to classify and identify all marine life, and involves some 100 scientists working in 80 countries. The census should contain an estimated 230,000 species once it is complete in 2010.

But Bouchet said the work completed so far represents just "the tip of the iceberg, given all the species that remain to be discovered and are continually being discovered."

Before the cataloguing is done, he said, researchers could uncover "five times as many marine species" as those currently known.

There are also several other ongoing projects aiming to catalogue the Earth's biodiversity and classify the 1.8 million species of plant and animal life on the planet.