Gigantic Marine Posters Educate And Entertain

A New Zealand-led project to produce an authoritative register of all the world's marine species is being publicised with a series of gigantic street movie posters unveiled in Christchurch.

The street posters, with each series measuring 75m long, were put together by Saatchi & Saatchi to advertise an underwater camera, but also each feature a million words about the sea and sea creatures.

Each 75m span includes the full texts of Moby Dick and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, plus the names of over 120,000 marine species, from the NZ-based World Register of Marine Species at marinespecies.

WoRMS is the brainchild of University of Auckland Leigh Marine Laboratory Associate Professor Mark Costello and colleagues at the Flanders Marine Institute, Belgium who host the database.

It combines the results of international marine research to produce the register, with over 100 experts in marine species editing and validating the species names and associated information.

Dr Costello, who ran a similar species register project in Europe between 1999-2000, said global coordination of species names was important to avoid misinterpretation of names, and confusion over the Latin spellings.

"Scientists estimate there are over one million marine species but only one fifth have been named so far," Dr Costello said in a statement.

The WoRMS list is planned to have validated 200,000 species names by the end of 2008, of an estimated 230,000 believed to have been formally described.

May 06, 2008