Washington ? Scuttling and floating almost two miles below the North Atlantic are a ghostly, foot-tall octopod with fins sprouting from its head, a soft coral with starry feathers and a flowerlike creature with the body of a worm.

Researchers showed otherworldly film of those and other creatures Thursday, demonstrating an unprecedented marine census that is discovering more than 30 new species of animal and plant life every week. And those three don’t even necessarily count.

“They can’t be described as a new species until we have a specimen,” Smithsonian biologist Michael Vecchione said of the deep-sea dive footage publicly screened for the first time at the National Museum of Natural History.

Scientists reporting their first findings since the project began in May 2000 said that by the time they finish in 2010, they may have found more than 2 million species of marine life.

“People have tended to look where it’s easy … and there’s so much more to be found,” said Jesse Ausubel, environmental scientist at The Rockefeller University in New York City. “We have discriminated in the past in favor of a very small number of species.”

Three hundred scientists from 53 countries are working on the decadelong census to learn the number of species, the species’ populations and where they live. So far, the Census of Marine Life includes 15,304 species of fish and 194,696 to 214,696 — there’s disagreement among the experts — species of animals and plants.

So far, the research is coming up with about 150 to 200 previously unknown species of fish and 1,700 new species of other aquatic animals and plants each year.

A new species of scorpionfish, Scorpaenopsis vittapinna, is among 15,304 fish species in the Census of Marine Life.

The scientists said they thought the oceans that extend across 70 percent of Earth’s surface hold about 20,000 species of fish and up to 1.98 million species of animals and plants. Many of those could be basic and small life forms, such as worms and jellyfish.

Scientists hope to gain a better understanding of life in the mostly unexplored seas. Environmentalists are looking to the data to counter overfishing and pollution that has depleted the ocean’s resources. Industry officials hope it will lead to more efficient fishing and shipping, new pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds.

“We have primarily studied a few hundred species that are of commercial importance,” said Ronald O’Dor, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada and the project’s chief scientist.

“Our goal by 2010 is to know as much about life in the oceans as we know about life on land now,” he said. “No one would claim that we know everything about life on land. There are probably still a few hundred thousand beetles in tropical forests that haven’t been described. But we’d like to aim for parity.”

So far, about $70 million has been spent on the census.