If you ever needed an example of nature's resilience, look no further than a species of fish known as coelacanth.
As Forbes detailed, a fisherman working in the Chalumna River on the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1938 caught a creature they didn't recognize. Museum employee Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who was working in the South African town of East London, was called on to provide some answers.
After taxidermy, Courtenay-Latimer decided the opinion of an expert was required. James Leonard Brierley Smith, a professor, soon arrived, and he confirmed the animal was indeed a coelacanth.
Incredibly, before this sighting, it was assumed the fish had been extinct for 65 to 70 million years.
Few sightings have been recorded since, but scientists discovered a second species of coelacanth in the 1990s in the waters of islands in Indonesia.
It's a remarkable example of how we have barely scratched the surface of understanding aquatic life. Julia Sigwart, a professor at Queen's University Belfast's School of Biological Sciences, told Earth.com that there might be 1.8 million unknown species living in the world's oceans.
But a changing climate is putting our waters in danger. As NASA has noted, 90% of warming activity on Earth has been absorbed by its oceans in the last few decades. The consequences of this can be severe, from sea-level rise to changes in the biochemistry of oceans.
With that in mind, the pollution we produce is not only affecting the estimated 240,000 species that have been documented in our oceans but the nearly 2 million that we have not yet discovered — and they all play a role in keeping the ecosystem healthy.
While conservation and restoration efforts have brought species on the brink of extinction back to good health, including the white cay iguana and the grasshopper sparrow, we need to take those lessons and apply them to the ocean, which covers about 71% of the planet.
Whether that's by reducing our production of planet-warming pollution — by stopping the burning of dirty fuel, most notably — or by keeping plastic out of the ocean, there is a lot that we need to do to ensure the health of both creatures we know and those that we don't.
Indeed, as scientists in the 20th century discovered, creatures that have survived millions of years longer than humans still call the oceans home. It would be a huge shame if our actions put those animals at risk of extinction.
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