The Oceans Are Teeming with Unknown Species

When a group of marine scientists decided to form the World Register of Marine Species in 2007, it only had a small team of 55 researchers from 17 countries, but a grand and ambitious goal: to create a definitive, online, open-access list of all the names for all the living species in the world’s oceans. The endeavor, known by the acronym WoRMS, emerged from the rich soil of another ambitious international project, The Census of Marine Life, which was trying to capture what we know, what we don’t, and what we can never know about life in our oceans.

WoRMS colonized a number of existing registers. Those included the European Register of Marine Species, species registers maintained at the Flanders Marine Institute, and the UNESCO-IOC Register of Marine Organisms (URMO), the first attempt to compile an electronic list of all marine species during the 1990s. URMO’s first version was published on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. WoRMS was a job for an army of taxonomists—or at least a battalion, about 300 all in all today—enlisted to describe, name, and classify marine species.

Now, 15 years that, aptly, thrives in cracks in submerged concrete structures, and , an octopus whose fins resemble the ears of a certain animated elephant. And in 2021, WoRMS started to move forward with a new goal: to as part of the UN Ocean Decade Project.