Too much is good

First the good news: Scientist participating in the Census of Marine Life have found far more biodiversity in the world’s oceans than they expected to find.

According to project’s website, www.coml.org, “The Census of Marine Life is a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year scientific initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. The world’s first comprehensive Census of Marine Life—past, present, and future—will be released in 2010.”

OK, the description may be a tad overblown, but it’s still an enormous, crucial project to understand the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the world’s seas, large portions of which are unexplored.

For example, the Associated Press reports, “Marine census researchers calculate there are a ‘nonillion’ [microorganisms].” [A nonillion is] 1,000 times 1 billion, times 1 billion, times 1 billion.

And now the bad news: Due to a media-promoted fear of the census, all those microorganisms have refused to send in their forms.