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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. The latest update on a 10-year census of marine life reads like something Walt Disney or Dr. Seuss might imagine. The report describes some of the thousands of species that oceanographers now say live in the depth of the ocean. Scientists have found tentacle transparent sea cucumbers and tube worms that feed on oil. And then there are these beasts called dumbos with large ear-like fins. All these species live below 656 feet – too deep for sunlight to penetrate. Jesse Ausubel is program director for the census of marine life project. He’s in New York. So I’ve got to ask you first Jesse, an oil-eating tube worm? What’s that about?

JESSE AUSUBEL: Animals need food. Food can come from the surface, from the sun, but food can come from inside of earth. And of course oil and gas come from the interior of earth. Bacteria live on oil and worms like the worm that you refer to – the wildcat worm as we call it – feeds on oil that seeps out of the continental margins of 5000 or 6000 feet deep.

WERMAN: So that oil-eating tube worm is just one of many species now being catalogued at these extreme depths. How many do you believe are still to be observed?

AUSUBEL: We’re reporting on almost 20,000 forms of life that never come closer to the surface than 600 or 700 feet. But there may be tens of thousands more and if you look at really small things like microbes there could be hundreds of thousands of more. You know there can be 10,000 unique types bacteria in a gram of sand. There are about 20 grams in an ounce. So if you look at the really small stuff it’s just huge. But we’ve been concentrating as you mentioned on the bigger animals like an octopus that’s about six feet long and weighs 13 pounds – almost as much as your Thanksgiving turkey. You might meet one of those down in the abyss.

WERMAN: It’s interesting how you actually go about this research because presumably you have to look at these animals. So how do you do that? I mean do you use night vision goggles? And if you introduce these unknown species to artificial light do you spook them?

AUSUBEL: Our team has conducted over 200 expeditions and we use all kinds of technology. We use acoustics like sonars to take pictures with sound of the animals. We do bring lights down deep and take photographs and in some cases we try to capture the animals as well. Some of them are not easy to capture as you can imagine. Especially in the pressures, the darkness, the cold at 15,000 or 20,000 feet deep.

WERMAN: Now you spoke about the tube worms and the fact that they eat oil. A lot of the species down at these depths eat something called marine snow. Explain what that is.

AUSUBEL: At the surface of the ocean you can think of the existence of meadows that do harvest the sunlight and grow grass – the ocean’s equivalent of grass, phytoplankton. And then the phytoplankton are fed on by other small animals and these fall to the sea floor. And so the snow that falls to the sea floor is also a source of food for animals down deep. I should mention that big animals also fall to the sea floor. You may have wondered what happens to a whale when it dies. Well a whale also falls to sea floor and then it becomes a feast – in fact a feast for some new kinds of worms that we’ve discovered including one called the ocidax which sounds kind of like a heavy metal band. But in fact it feeds on whale bones.

WERMAN: Now that’s not the only stuff that’s falling to the ocean floor. There’s also pollutants and then you add to that over fishing and rising CO2 and nitrogen levels. I’m wondering how your research, how this census, sheds light if you will on what human beings are doing above the surface. How is that affecting the ocean at these depths?

AUSUBEL: In some places where we’ve explored, for example some parts of the Mediterranean, we found more trash than life on the sea floor even in 10,000 or 12,000 feet of water. So there’s a lot of trash going into the ocean and of course it has to have somewhere to go. Over the long term as you mentioned of course people worry that warming of the surface atmosphere and the surface waters could also penetrate to the deep and that would certainly change the distribution of life and the kinds of life that flourish there.

WERMAN: Jesse Ausubel, program director for the census of marine life. Thank you very much for your time.

AUSUBEL: Marco thank you.

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