CHENNAI, India, Jan. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Indian scientists have been trying to find out what the Dec. 26 tsunami killing over 150,000 people in Asia has done on the sea, The New Indian Express published here Wednesday reported.

    Indian ocean scientists and marine biologists are completely inthe dark whether the tsunami has created any change in deep-water marine life and in the chemical and physical composition of the sea.

    Research vessels of India's fishery and oceanographic survey agencies have already been doing rounds of the Indian Ocean, said the report.

    The scientists want to know if the tsunami has brought any qualitative change in the sea and the churning of the sea has brought out nutrients settled in the bottom, an unnamed senior official at India's Department of Ocean Development was quoted as saying.

    One research vessel, the Sagar Kanya, which is currently at thelowmost portion of the South of Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu state, will take sonar images and also collect samples to understand changes in the chemical oceanography.

    While another vessel, the Sagar Sampada, is equipped to study biological material. The scientists from various agencies across the country are also busily testing mud and water samples to studychanges in the constituency, the paper said.

    The scientists are baffled as large-scale mortality of marine-life or carcasses of fish coming to the shore have been almost unreported after the tsunami.

    There have been no carcasses washed ashore. But it has to be investigated if there has been any mortality in the deep-waters, the officer said.

    In October 2004, a field officer in Cuddalore working for the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute reported that a species of fish, Red Bait or Aranaival, found only in deep-waters had been caught by fishermen in shallow waters and this could be awarning for the onset of a natural calamity.

    Cuddalore, about 160 kilometers south of Chennai, is one of theworst tsunami-hit area in southern India, with at least 612 peoplekilled and about 60,000 others displaced by the tidal waves.

    The fish normally changes its inhabitation only when the seas experience turbulence, which was reported before in 1977, 1979, 1987 and 1996, the paper quoted Mohammed Qasim, a scientist in charge of the institute, as saying.

    The field scientist said in his report that it was to be noted that in all these years some sort of natural calamity had struck, including a tsunami in Japan and cyclones in the Bay of Bengal.

    "The institute will study the behavior of the fish and also initiate research on the subject. If marine lives do have an early-warning system that could also be a reason why there has been no mass destruction of marine life," said Qasim. Enditem