*An international team of scientists including Universite Laval biologist Connie Lovejoy has discovered new life forms in the Arctic Ocean. The team's findings are reported in the January 12 edition of the journal Science.*

Canadian connection in discovery of new ocean life form
Charlie Fidelman, CanWest News Service; Montreal GazettePublished:Friday,January12,2007

MONTREAL - An international team of scientists, which included Quebec biologist Connie Lovejoy, announced Thursday it has discovered a new form of life distinct from anything else in the ocean.They called the tiny plant micro-organism picobiliphytes.Published in today's edition of the journal Science, the team's findings are considered an important discovery, with implications for biodiversity starting at the bottom of the food chain.

"The ocean covers 70 per cent of planet Earth and we are only now coming to appreciate its rich and complex biodiversity,'' said Lovejoy, a specialist in marine phytoplankton, the Universite Laval biologist, who joined a European Union project launched to determine whether plant cells less then three microns - a millionth of a metre - existed around European coastal waters.
Despite evading scientific detection, these newly discovered algae - found among the smallest members of light-sensitive phytoplankton - are actually quite abundant, Lovejoy said. ''They went unrecognized because they probably looked like something else.''The discovery resulted from advance analysis of DNA sequences. The Arctic samples, analyzed by Lovejoy, matched the European ones.Because of their extremely small size, the only way to actually see them was by using a special stain, and then only under a fluorescent microscope.

About 50 per cent of global photosynthesis - a vital biochemical process in which carbon dioxide is transformed to oxygen - takes place in the world's oceans, which are dominated by microscopic algae.Scientists believe many species - some estimate up to 90 per cent - are not yet identified.''We are really waking up in terms of how we are thinking about the ocean,'' said Lovejoy, who is on the Canadian board of the Census of Marine Life, a worldwide initiative, involving dozens of institutions, to assess marine organisms in the world's oceans.

The discovery of picobiliphytes is important in the context of global warming and climate change, said Mart Gross, professor of conservation biology at the University of Toronto.''Just like this finding here, there are major discoveries being made about remarkable life forms that are very relevant to our understanding of the ecology of ecosystems,'' Gross said. ''We don't know even what is being impaired in our oceanic waters. It may very well be that (picobiliphytes) are an essential basis for the existence of life in the Arctic.''

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