Marine researchers on a mission to record life hidden in the world’s oceans have reported they found about 100 potential new species — including one mystery starlike creature.

The expedition team focused its investigation on the 500-mile (800-kilometer) long Bounty Trough, a little-explored part of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand, east of South Island. The scientists’ three-week voyage aboard the research vessel Tangaroa, which belongs to the country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, occurred in February.

The team collected almost 1,800 samples from depths as far down as 3 miles (4,800 meters), finding species of fish, squid, mollusk and coral that they believe are new to science. “You’ve got this big area off the east coast of New Zealand where there’s just an absolutely paucity of data points. We don’t know anything about it,” said Dr. Daniel Moore, expedition science manager of Ocean Census, a new alliance launched in April 2023 that aims to identify 100,000 unknown species in the next 10 years. “It was true exploration, very exciting.”….

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/11/world/100-species-ocean-census-new-zealand-scn/index.html