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# The year the ocean introduced itself
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/ocean-census/
- Published: 2026-08-11T20:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T08:04:05.000Z
- Description: Scientists found 1,121 new marine species in a single year, and they are just getting started.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories, Rewilding

Between the middle of last year and the middle of this one, scientists working with the global Ocean Census found and described 1,121 species new to science, a rise of more than half on the year before. The census, founded by the Nippon Foundation and the ocean research institute Nekton, set itself the cheerfully enormous goal of finding one hundred thousand new marine species within a decade, on the reasoning that you cannot care for neighbours you have never met. This was the year the introductions sped up: a giant phantom jellyfish drifting past a camera at 250 metres, ribbon worms in vivid stripes off Timor Leste whose chemistry may one day help make new medicines, and sponges off Japan with skeletons of clear glass.

What we like best is how unglamorous the work is. Most of these creatures were not found by billion dollar machines but by taxonomists, the patient scientists who compare, describe and name, working through samples from expeditions across the world and finally giving each animal its formal introduction to the rest of us. Every name added to the list is a small act of housekeeping for the planet: a creature that can now be counted, mapped and looked after. At this pace, the children learning to snorkel this summer will grow up with an ocean atlas thousands of pages richer than ours.

Our short take: census figures reported by **Scientific American**; expedition finds from the **Schmidt Ocean Institute** and **Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences**. The census is run by the **Nippon Foundation** and **Nekton**. Cover photograph: sea nettles, a stand in for the census finds.