Part 4: What lies beneath 20 C: ‘It is easy to be captivated by intelligent, seemingly friendly sea
creatures such as dolphins, or even by the hunting prowess of
the more sinister sharks.’
21 D: ‘The Mediterranean has the largest number of invasive species –
most of them having migrated through the Suez Canal from the
Red Sea.’
22 B: ‘a myriad range of creatures that could have slithered out of the
pages of science fiction’.
23 D: ‘As Mediterranean turtles lose their nesting sites to beach
developments, or die in fishing nets, and the vanishing
population of other large predators such as bluefish tuna are
fished out, their prey is doing what nature does best; filling a
void. Smaller, more numerous species like jellyfish are flourishing
and plugging the gap left by animals higher up the food chain.’
Predators are disappearing and being replaced by creatures they
used to eat.
24 A: ‘In total, the Census now estimates that there are more than
230,000 known marine species, but that this is probably less
than a quarter of what lives in the sea.’
25 D: ‘Hidden within the Marine Census results is a dark message.
Maps showing the density of large fish populations in tropical
waters reveal that numbers of many of the biggest open ocean
species have declined.’
26 C: algae that look like ‘a pair of pink stockings’ and octopuses that
look like ‘ornaments’ of a certain kind.
27 D: ‘it is unwise to talk as if the jellyfish have some kind of plan’.
28 A: ‘The truth is that at present much of what passes for scientific
‘facts’ about the sea and what lives in it are still based on
guesswork.’
29 A: The Census contains the numbers of ‘individual forms of life that
can be scientifically classified as species’.
30 B: It is the creepy-crawlies that are out there in really big numbers.
Almost 40 percent of identified marine species are crustaceans
and molluscs’ – ‘creepy-crawlies’ is used as an informal term for
crustaceans and molluscs.
31 C: ‘how would we begin to start naming the 20,000 types of
bacteria found in just one litre of seawater trawled from around
a Pacific seamount?’
32 A: The scientists involved in the Census ‘hope that by creating
the first catalogue of the world’s oceans, we can begin to
understand the great ecological questions about habitat loss,
pollution, over fishing and all the other man-made plagues that
are being visited upon the sea.’