Marine Biodiversity is the theme for this year’s International Day for Biological Diversity, which takes place on May 22.
A Beach Safari will take place on Grattan Beach, Salthill, Co Galway, at 2pm on May 26 to mark the event.
This is your chance to explore the shore with experts from the Galway Branch of the Irish Wildlife Trust and Galway Atlantaquaria and in conjunction with Galway City Council. Everybody is welcome, including families.
With experts on hand to help identify and talk about the inhabitants of the shore this will be a fun day out for everybody. The event is part of Galway’s Marine Month of Madness.
Tel 091 585100 for more details or email [email protected].
From 2000 to 2010, an unprecedented worldwide collaboration by scientists around the world set out to try and determine how much life is in the sea.
Dubbed the ‘Census of Marine Life’, the effort involved 2,700 scientists from over 80 nations, who participated in 540 expeditions around the world. They studied surface seawater and probed the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, sailed tropical seas and explored ice-strewn oceans in the Arctic and Antarctic.
By the time the Census ended, it had added 1,200 species to the known roster of life in the sea; scientists are still working their way through another 5,000 specimens to determine whether they are also newly-discovered species. The estimate of the number of known marine species – the species that have been identified and the ones that have been documented but await classification – has increased as a direct result of the Census efforts, and is now around 250,000. (This total does not include some microbial life forms such as marine viruses.)
In its final report, the Census team suggested it could be at least a million. Some think the figure could be twice as high.
See http://www.cbd.int/idb/2012/ for further details.