Wrong names for fish seen complicating conservation

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - About a third of all types of fish and other marine life have been wrongly named by scientists, complicating efforts to conserve what could be a million marine species, experts said on Wednesday.

Inaugurating a World Register of Marine Species (www.marinespecies.org), they said the breadcrumb sponge, found in the North Atlantic in many shapes and colors, held the record for misleading synonyms with 56 Latin names.

"Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census," Mark Costello of the University of Auckland, co-founder of the register, said in a statement.

The register, trying to sort out a tangle of multiple Latin names for marine organisms from whales to plankton, has validated names of 122,500 species after eliminating 56,400 aliases, or 32 percent of all names reviewed.

"For 250 years scientists have been describing species in the oceans but there is no complete list," Ward Appeltans of the Flanders Marine Institute and data manager of the register told Reuters. "We are now creating that list."

Experts at the register estimate that 230,000 species are known to science and that three times more are yet to be found, giving a final total that could exceed a million. The register hopes to give an overview of known species by October 2010.

New species get a two-word Latin name as their formal identity. But scientists often wrongly believe they have found a new species and give a new name.

The oldest name usually takes precedence, as with the breadcrumb sponge's name Halichondrea panicea given in 1766. Later names for the same sponge include Alcyonium manusdiaboli in 1794 or Trachyopsilla glaberrima in 1931.