Census of Marine Life Reveals Abundant Diversity of Microbes

Abstract

The International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM), part of the Census of Marine Life, uncovered a more diverse and larger population of microbes than was known or anticipated, according to principal investigator Mitch Sogin, director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and his collaborators there and at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Texel, the Netherlands. “The most important observation is that diversity is not just a few thousands of microorganisms,” he says. “It's at least a half-million microorganisms, and maybe one or two magnitudes more.”