standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

speaking, TNHM had the types for any bits of an old map that were coloured
pink, including all the Australian types from the Great Barrier Reef. By
contrast, at universities that hoarded collections, inevitably the lecturer
interested in them died and eventually the collection was shovelled into a
bin somewhere.
Museums were run by governments, not by universities. As part of
the civil service, their culture was different. Some museums did not have a
management culture that was interested in commerce. They were paid a
set fee from the civil service. If the International Seabed Authority was
looking for a central taxonomic facility, he recommended that it ask an
institution for proof that it had done that kind of work before. There was a
difference between a museum serving its scientists and a body serving a
commercial need.
Regional species pools
Regarding the size of regional species pools, he said the problem
could be described in this way: if a station in the CCFZ recorded an average
of 130 species and a month later the number remained the same, were
they the same or different species? No one knew, because no one had ever
gone back to the same deep-sea area more than once to try to establish
this. The problem would be addressed for the first time at a deep shelf site
in the Antarctic Ocean, where a series of samples would be taken
throughout the year to look for temporal variation.
The size of the regional pool was important. He had tried plotting
for nematodes the kind of graph done by Rex for molluscs (see chapter 14
above), though he had not had the nerve to publish it because the data on
molluscs gave a much better idea about their regional pool. His data
suggested that the small group of species in the sample were a subset of a
regional pool that was spitting species in, possibly more or less at random.
If the regional pool in the CCFZ held 5000 species, for example, the
problem was obvious. Of course, nothing could be said about whether a
nematode species would be made extinct by mining operations, since there
was no idea of their range. One of the difficulties was that there was almost
certain to be a sibling-species problem; although this was not a great issue
locally when sorting specimens from a core, it would really kick in when
trying to look across big areas.
388
INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY