Naming the Deep Before It Disappears

Nekton, founded in 2014, runs deep-ocean expeditions and, since 2023, the Ocean Census with The Nippon Foundation — a ten-year programme designed to attack the bottleneck in marine taxonomy, where a newly found animal can wait more than a decade for formal description. By pairing shipboard sampling with rapid imaging and distributed expert networks, the programme confirmed over 1,100 new species within a single twelve-month period, a 54% jump in the annual rate. Its expeditions have reached the Nankai Trough and Shichiyo Seamount Chain off Japan, where a 2025 survey with JAMSTEC lifted the count of animal species known from the region's cold seeps from 14 to 80, and the Southern Ocean, which yielded a carnivorous 'death-ball' sponge among 30 new species. Nekton has also run first-descent missions with host nations including Seychelles and the Maldives, training local scientists to work in their own deep waters rather than watching foreign vessels do it.