Scientists charting life in the earth’s oceans have found 10 to 100 times more species of bacteria than expected, including many new and rare microorganisms.

“These observations blow away all previous estimates of bacterial diversity in the ocean,” says Mitchell Sogin, with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

He and his colleagues from the U.S., the Netherlands and Spain did a genetic analysis of eight samples of water taken from different sites in the Atlantic and the Pacific, from depths ranging from 550 to 4,100 metres. They were astonished by what they found. There were 20,000 species of microbes in just one litre of sea water.

They had expected fewer than 3,000

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