WITH ocean life under ever greater threat, a scramble is on to catalogue marine diversity before it disappears. Biologists are finding that there is much more down there than anyone ever imagined.
Paul Barber of the Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Sarah Boyce of Harvard University use the technique known as DNA barcoding to catalogue species. By reading a short length of mitochondrial DNA, known species can be identified, and the number of unknown species can be estimated on the basis of variations in the length of that DNA. When Barber and Boyce used the method…
