News in Brief from the Detroit Free Press

According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity, currently taking place in Valencia, Spain, scientists discussed updates to the "Marine Census Report", a project from 2,000 scientists in 80 nations to account for all the organisms found in the world's ocean by 2010. They found that:

• The census has discovered more than 5,300 new species since 2000. These species include blind lobsters and sulfur-eating bacteria.
• Genetic evidence from deep-sea octopi shows that new species evolved from predecessors over 30 million years ago.
• Tens of millions of brittle sea stars were found laid end to end on an undersea mountain in the Antarctic ocean.

Also, in the same article, researchers from Old Dominion University have solved the case of the disappearing rat population on Christmas Island in 1906. Rats thrived on the island only seven years before. The team of researchers blamed the rat extinction on a "stowaway" black rat that arrived on a British ship that arrived on the Australian island and spread a "so-called hyperdisease" which wiped out the native rat population. Published in PLoS One, a scientific journal, this is the first case of population extinction caused by disease.