Technologies Changing Insight Into Seas

"Because the ocean is vast," said Fred Grassle, who directs Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Studies, "biologists sort of threw up their hands." With the new technologies, however, "There's a bit of a cultural change in ocean biology. . . . We really have much more of a global community of biological oceanographers that are taking advantage" of new tools.

"These are capabilities that really didn't exist 10 years ago," said Duke's Halpin, whose database includes 1.1 million entries on 449 marine species collected between 1935 and 2006.

Much of this work is being done through the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year, $650 million project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, involving 2,000 scientists from the Arctic to the South Pacific. They are relying on four major technologies to do their work: acoustics; tagging and tracking; genetic analysis and optical cameras.

"This is a social revolution of thousands of people around the world cooperating," said Jesse Ausubel, the foundation's program manager for the project.

Now in its sixth year, the census has catalogued 77,000 different marine species and collected 10 million records. It has produced dozens of revelations: In 2006 alone, researchers found a single school of 8 million fish the size of Manhattan off the New Jersey coast as well as the hottest-known hydrothermal vent, which sustains marine life even as it spews liquid from below the sea floor at 765 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wiebe, whose zooplankton research is funded by the census, is developing DNA-based bar codes to allow instant identification of unfamiliar species while at sea.

"The moment we have the Rosetta stone, we're off to the future," he said. "The fundamental question we're asking here is, what lies in the ocean now?"

Even as they document the seas in new ways, researchers say they are seeing it depleted at a rapid rate. "We're concerned that by the time we can see and understand the ocean, there won't be enough of it left to see," Halpin said.

Satellite tags produce some of the most pioneering research: Many use a pressure, temperature and light sensors to determine where creatures are swimming and how long they stay in a given place.

Ausubel joked that as a result, scientists now understand "how cosmopolitan the fish populations are," including "tuna that commute between San Francisco and Tokyo, or Houston and Naples."

Sometimes boaters or beachcombers have found the titanium, seawater-resistant tags after they drifted across vast distances and returned them for a $500 reward. One woman recovered one of Block's tags in Hawaii, and 5-year-old Calvin Wisner found one while walking on the beach with his parents near San Francisco just after Christmas last year.

Sometimes, however, the search exacts a toll. When the locating technology showed that the great white shark's tag had washed ashore, Perle could not locate it at first because the radio signals were bouncing off nearby cliffs. After he finally found it, it took him a month to recover from "the worst case of poison oak in my life."

"It was no small amount of suffering," Perle said, adding that he was happy to discover from the data that the shark in question not only dove into cold water 1,640 feet deep but stayed there for hours.

"Was it worth it? I guess it was worth it. You shouldn't have to get poison oak, though."