After I wrote yesterday about the United Nation’s robot census, Ryan Bigge emailed me to point out another major population-count that is currently underway: The fish census. It’s a multi-university study, and it’s discovering about three new fish species per day. They figure there are at least 5,000 types of fish we’ve never or rarely encountered, as the Associated Press notes:

“We’ve tended to be interested in the things that we eat,” said Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at The Rockefeller University in New York City. He helps run the census for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which provided $20 million in funding.

“We’ve tended not to be interested in the things that pass through our nets or don’t taste good,” Ausubel said. “But the small critters are tremendously important in the ecosystem … and in an evolutionary sense, the small things came first. They’re ancient, and they’re survivors.”

“We’ve tended to be interested in the things that we eat.” Could someone translate that into Latin for me? I want to put it on the Collision Detection coat of arms.