Up to 90% of ocean species have never been formally identified by science. Living creatures, sharing this planet with us right now, that science cannot name, track, or protect. They exist. We just haven’t discovered them yet.
Formally identifying a single new species through traditional scientific methods takes an average of 13 years. It requires specialists, funding, and institutional time that most researchers don't have. Meanwhile, climate change, trawling, pollution, and acidification are working considerably faster than 13 years per species. Some creatures are going extinct before science even learns their names.
A group of scientists, backed by the Nippon Foundation and a global network of 650+ marine institutes, decided that was unacceptable and built a program to change it.
What the Ocean Census Actually Is.
The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census, launched in 2023, as the world's largest coordinated mission to accelerate ocean species discovery. Its mandate: find life faster than we're losing it.
It does this in two ways.
Expeditions — sending ships to the least-explored corners of the ocean with scientists and technology capable of sampling, imaging, and collecting specimens at depths most research programs don't reach.
Discovery workshops — gathering taxonomists (specialists in classifying species) in one room with samples from recent expeditions and decades-old museum collections, and pushing them to move faster than the old system allowed.
This year the Census ran 13 expeditions and 9 workshops across Australia, Chile, Japan, Germany, South Africa, and India. The result:
1,121 newly documented marine species that didn’t exist a year ago.
Who They Found
The 1,121 species span every depth and environment, from shallow reefs to the abyssal plain, reaching down to 6,575 meters below the surface.
A few worth knowing:
The Ghost Shark. Found in the Coral Sea Marine Park off Australia, at 800+ meters, belongs to one of the oldest vertebrate lineages on Earth diverging from sharks and rays 400 million years ago.
📸 Credit: The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census/CSIRO
Carnivorous 'Death Ball’ Sponge. Found 3,601 meters below the surface near the South Sandwich Islands, one of the most remote island chains on Earth, this newly documented species of Chondrocladia lives in perpetual darkness.
Nicknamed the “Death Ball,” it is covered in microscopic hook-like structures that snag small crustaceans drifting past in the current. Once trapped, the sponge slowly envelops and digests its prey. Most sponges filter food from the water. This one hunts!
📸 Credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Why It Matters
We cannot protect what we haven't named.
Under international law, the High Seas Treaty, or broader conservation frameworks, species must first be identified and documented before they can formally be protected.
Michelle Taylor, Head of Science at Ocean Census, put it simply:
"We are in a race against time. For too long, thousands of species have remained in scientific limbo because the pace of discovery couldn't keep up. We are now breaking that bottleneck."
What makes the Ocean Census remarkable is not just what it finds, but how quickly it is accelerating discovery.
Some of the 1,120+ species announced this year weren’t newly collected. They had been sitting in museum collections and laboratory freezers for decades, waiting for a specialist with the time and funding to formally describe them. The Census is helping clear that backlog while simultaneously conducting 13 new expeditions around the world.
Year one built the foundation. Year two scaled the effort. Year three documented 1,121 species.
And with an estimated 90% of the ocean still unexplored, they’re just getting started.
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Sources: Ocean Census
📸 Credit: The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census/CSIRO (Ghost Shark)
📸 Credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute (Death Ball)
From the issue: Nel Blu Issue 003 (May 26, 2026)