Excited project leaders believe the "rapid ongoing discovery of new marine species shows no end in sight" according to the findings of the first global Census of Marine Life.

About 230,000 marine species have been documented by scientists, but the eventual count of such species is likely to be several times this number, researchers said.

"We have barely skimmed the surface," said Frederick Grassle of Rutgers University, director of the Ocean Biographic Information System (OBIS), a 9.5 million dollar program which is attempting to map all the world's marine species.

"Humans have explored less than five percent of the world's oceans ... Thus opportunities abound to discover species and increase our knowledge," Grassle said.

According to OBIS, "near-surface" records account for 95 percent of all existing observations of ocean life, but less than 0.1 percent are from the bottom half of the water column.

A species collected below 2,000 meters (6,000 feet) is about 50 times more likely to be new to science than one found at 50 meters, the researchers said.

Some 106 new species of marine fish have been added to the OBIS database so far this year, at an average of well over two new species per week, bringing the total of marine fish species to 15,482 at the latest count.

The project's coordinators have amassed 5.2 million new and previously existing records mapping the distribution of 38,000 marine species around the globe.

Recent findings will be discussed at a meeting of participating scientists in Hamburg, Germany on November 29.

Their work has also pulled back a curtain on the ebbing fortunes of different marine populations.

Comparison of historical and current data shows that the population of oceanic whitetip sharks in the Gulf of Mexico has plummeted by 99 percent since the mid-1950s.

However, the loss of the sharks and other predators sparked an explosion of corresponding magnitude in the population of pelagic stingrays.

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