00:02Applications only opened early this week, but we would normally expect through the application
00:06process to receive enough applications to fill around 300 days of ship time a year,
00:11which keeps us pretty busy.
00:12The investigator is Australia's National Marine Science Vessel, so we operate the vessel
00:16here at the CSIRO on behalf of the entire Australian research community and on behalf
00:20of the Australian public, so the ultimately successful researchers who are coming on board
00:25need to demonstrate not only that the science and the research they're doing is of really
00:28high quality and excellent standard, but there also has to have a benefit to the country
00:32for doing that, and that would have to be across the whole suite of marine sciences, from marine
00:37geoscience to oceanography, marine biology, even atmospheric sciences.
00:41Voyages can take up to 60 people, and we can go to sea for up to 60 days, and during
00:45that
00:46time we don't stop into ports or other places around the country, we are just out there at
00:50sea.
00:50So obviously as you can imagine, a 60-day voyage is a pretty long amount of time, we can get
00:54a lot of work done, but we need to make sure that everyone who's coming on board is getting
00:57along, because it's a pretty unique social environment out there at sea as well.
01:01We're super lucky here in Australia, we have this amazing marine estate, and what's still
01:06quite exciting about it is that many of the things that live in it are undescribed, undiscovered.
01:10So we estimate that really only about 10% of the species that live in Australian waters
01:15have currently been discovered, so 90% of what's out there is undiscovered, undescribed,
01:19and unexplored.
01:20So just on investigator voyages alone, over the past 12 years we've had about 180 new species
01:26discovered, and just in 2025 alone we added 22 new species to that list, which is really
01:31great.
01:32It's actually quite an involved process to describe and ultimately name a species, it
01:35can take several years, and there's kind of a couple of unwritten rules around it, so
01:39for example you can't really name a species after yourself, that's one of the kind of unwritten
01:43rules, but what we find is that a lot of people will name them after things in popular culture
01:47like the Game of Thrones, celebrities like David Attenborough or Beyonce have had species named
01:52after them, and as you mentioned investigator has been lucky enough, being the vessel that
01:56a lot of these species were first discovered on, to have half a dozen or so species named
02:00after it.
02:01But look, as I mentioned in Australia we have this amazing marine estate and that includes
02:04the Antarctic Territories, but we really only have a good handle on a tiny fraction of what
02:09is out there.
02:10And obviously if we want to make good decisions about how we look after these environments,
02:13how we manage them, how we understand them under a changing climate in the future, we
02:17first of all need to know what's out there, we need to know what that ecosystem looks
02:20like in its kind of natural state, so that we can make good decisions for the future.
Comments