MarBlog

My background is in zooplankton ecology before walking down the data management route. As such i still keep an eye on things in this area, and the recent report from the ICES Study Group on Integrated Morphological Taxonomy (SGIMT) has released their report, wherein the recommendation is put forward to standardise marine taxnonomic nomenclature. No big surprises there – it is an area that we’re all too familiar with – there are lots of areas where things should be controlled better – but you have inherited a system with 10,000 old versions of names and there is neitehr the time nor the money to update it all.

However, the World Register of Marine Species (WORMS) include a Taxon Match facility, which will match up your list of species names with the authorative list and provide you with additional reference information, including ITIS codes (TSN), Aphia ID, authorities, Kindum, phyla etc. which gives you a good chance of restruturing and updating older lists which may have drifted. I tried it out on a list of approximately 7,000 species of phyto- and zoo-plankton (although you have to break it down into chuks of maximum 1500 records in a single match), and generally got about 60-70% match. It’s pretty nice to have clear up nearly 5,000 records for an hours work rather than a long and painful serach of each individual line.

OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System), originally established under Census of Marine Life is animpressive alliance of people working to make biogeographic data available. As a whole, they now hold well over 27 million records and 849 data sets, which are accessible through the portal.

However, I thought I’d like to highlight a particular aspect – the OBIS Seamap. It includes observations on marine mammals, seabirds and sea turtles, as well as accessing environmental variables. In addition, there are links to a wide range of tools and additional databases ranging from photographic fin matching to sea turtle nesting sites.

However, it is the functionality of this site that is really impressive. Beyond the ability to search through over 2 million observations by data set, species, locations etc etc. you are also able to extract all the relevant information directly to freely available mapping tools such as google earth (export a kml file to work on, based on your search results) as well as OGC compliant formats for web mapping or file services. Altogether, the strong presentation of data sets combined with a well laid out and thought out set of functionalities demonstrates a very competent site, which will hopefully serve as inspiration to others looking to publish large volumes of marine data online.

Image courtesy of NASA

It’s hitting the news today that NASA found an amphipod while lowering a down below an ide sheet, reaching a depth of about 200m. According to the article, it’s quite a large amphipod (certainly compared to the ones i see in plankton nets in the North Sea) of about 7-8cm long. Whiel retracting the cable, the researchers also saw what they believe to be the tentacle of a jelly fish, although no footage was caught of this.

What makes this finding interesting is the depth of the ice sheet. This hole was drilled ~20km inland from the sea, and was only 8 inches wide. To catch an animal in there is either a complete fluke, or there’s quite a high concentration of them down there (only repeated drillings and observations would verify this). And what’s evenly intriguing is that these amphipods must feed on something. Typically the food chain in the sea relies on light or in extreme cases some area of chemical synthesis driven by e.g. temperature or presence of nutrients in high concentrations (like deep sea vents).