Five miles off the coast of Timor-Leste in Southeast Asia, a Florida Museum marine biologist was part of a specialized team that pulled off a massive project aboard the OceanXplorer.
Gustav Paulay is the curator of our invertebrate zoology collection. He is very active in the research community, collaborating with other institutions surveying the biodiversity of whole marine ecosystems in specialized operations.
This bioblitz was very ambitious.
A bioblitz is a large-scale survey that documents biodiversity in a specific place for a specific amount of time. It takes planning and coordination. This team committed to explore, sample and catalog as much of the marine life of Timor-Leste as possible in two weeks.
[Hundreds of New Species in 2 Weeks? Inside a Real-Life Ocean BioBlitz video created by OceanX]
The focus of this marine bioblitz was invertebrates. But Gustav wanted to put that in perspective.
“By invertebrate, I mean animal diversity,” he said. “Think of it. There are, let’s say, 33 animal phyla – 32 and 2/3 – we call invertebrates. One sub-phylum in one phylum is the vertebrates. But because we are vertebrates, we kind of think ‘us versus them’ and ‘them’ is everything else. So, we are really looking at animal diversity, not invertebrates, right?”
The team takes a very precise and measured approach to the bioblitz, sorting and preserving everything they can as quickly as they can so that when they bring their specimens to the lab, they have the luxury of methodically examining everything with more depth and in fine detail. They anticipate identifying hundreds of new species from this bioblitz.
From sea cucumbers and corals to sea stars and worms, scientists know that we have so much more to discover in the oceans. Our current catalog of marine biodiversity is just a sliver of what is likely out there.
Explore more of this work with the scientists on this expedition as they discuss how and why they catalog each specimen into a museum collection, the significance of creating a holotype, processing DNA as well as photos, and adding these references to the growing library of life on Earth for today’s researchers and tomorrow’s new questions.
Gustav added his motives for documenting biodiversity in these hard-to-reach places: “The most effective way for conservation is for people to understand what’s out there. We will be able to say which locations are especially interesting for setting up protected areas. We’ll be able to identify ways to draw resource use or tourism interest.”
This is a small selection of specimens from our collection that are from earlier expeditions in the region. Browse our Specify portal for more specimens.
More
- Featured video: Hundreds of New Species in 2 Weeks? Inside a Real-Life Ocean BioBlitz
- OceanX | on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OceanX
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