Monday, a marine census revealed that there were 7,500 documented species in the Antarctic and another 5,500 in the Arctic, proving that polar oceans are significantly populated and not biological deserts, as it has been previously thought.

Moreover, the census also informed that the polar oceans were inhabited by several hundred new to science species.

Victoria Wadley, a researcher from the Australian Antarctic Division, who participated in the survey concerning the Antarctic, stated that the textbooks had said that at the poles, compared to the tropics, there was less diversity in terms of inhabiting species.

Nevertheless, she added, researchers had recently discovered that marine life in the Antarctic and Arctic oceans displayed astonishing richness, further saying that the scientists were in the process of rewriting the textbooks.

A major surprise that the researchers came into when documenting the polar sea species was that dozens of those species were found to inhabit both polar oceans, which are located approximately 7,000 miles apart from each other.

The majority of the new species were invertebrates, with researchers having discovered strings of sea spider species the size of a human hand, along with shrimp-like crustaceans in the Arctic basin living at  9,850 feet depth.

The survey conducted with regards to the two polar seas was part of a series of projects of the Census of Marine Life, which is an international effort aimed at cataloging all ocean life.

The census has been scheduled to be published in 2010 and it has received support from governments, divisions of the United Nations and private conservation organizations.