Ideal and actual inventories of biodiversity
Résumé
The detection and identification of the species living on a given area is usually supposed
to provide a corpus of basic knowledge enabling biologists to develop further
pieces of knowledge. However, it reveals surprisingly difficult to achieve biological
inventories satisfying the criteria pertaining to such basic knowledge. Our aim in this
paper is to highlight how the current practice of biological inventory is shaped by
various constraints and potential biases. This leads us to re-consider the functions of
inventories at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In order to do so, we present
the example of deep-sea fauna inventories in the Pacific Ocean. We focus on one source
of bias in this case: the lasting influence of the so-called “azoic hypothesis”, formulated
in the 1840s, according to which there is no life under 600 meters. We show how the
azoic hypothesishas strongly influenced the conception of deep-sea fauna even though
it has been quickly refuted. At the end of the paper, we look into the implications of
economical constraints on the current practice of deep-sea biological inventory.