(gentle music)
(whales calling)
- The scope of the
biodiversity in the oceans
is almost hard to imagine.
By volume about 99% of
the habitable portion
of our planet is underwater.
We know that we're losing
a lot of biodiversity
from the oceans and so the
mission of Ocean Genome Legacy
is to try to capture some of
the diversity of the oceans
that is expressed in the
DNA of those organisms,
and then to make those DNAs
available to researchers
so they can learn more about the oceans
and how we can protect them.
- [Rosie] Cataloging the
ocean is an impossible task,
so we work with collaborators
to ship out kits
so that they can collect the species
that they interact with.
We have sent over 300 kits to
researchers around the world.
- We have over 28,000 DNA samples
from 25,000 different specimens.
Those come from about 1,100
families and 39 phyla.
- The way that OGL kits
work is that a researcher
will request a kit, or
we will contact them
and ask them to collect samples for us.
In that kit will be tubes
that have the samples in them,
and then data sheets that
have all of the metadata
about the individual specimen
they're collecting from.
We can also send things
like a waterproof camera
so people can take images
of the specimen in the wild
or as they're collecting them.
We'll take a small piece
of tissue from the sample
that they send us and we'll
extract the DNA from that,
and then I archive it and
stick it in the freezer.
- A recent example of a unique species
that actually comes
from the research we do
at Ocean Genome Legacy, where
we discovered a new species
of ship worm.
Ship worms normally are
clams that burrow in wood
and eat wood.
This strange species
actually burrows in rock
and it actually ingests rock.
We really know very little about this
other than it's an unusual organism
doing something very unusual
and so it's pretty likely
that it's doing something of
great interest for science.
I never know what I'm gonna find out
on that particular day.
What a student might have
discovered in the lab,
or what a colleague may
contact us and tell us about.
Part of what maintains all
of our interest in science,
it's always the unknown,
it's always what are we
gonna find out today.
(gentle music)
