Saving Seafood

Deep Ocean Sound Confused Scientists For Years. We Finally Know What Makes It.

September 27, 2024 — A mysterious sound heard booming from deep under the ocean waves has finally been traced to a fascinating source.

First recorded in 2014 in the west Pacific, the “biotwang” is actually the call of the Bryde’s whale (Balaenoptera brydei) traveling long distances in the open ocean. What’s more, the techniques used to identify the sound have led to the development of a new tool for understanding whale populations and how they move about in and inhabit Earth’s enigmatic seas.

“Bryde’s whales occur worldwide in tropical and warm temperate waters, but their population structure and movements are not well understood,” writes a team led by biological oceanographer Ann Allen of NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Hawaii.

“Our results provide evidence for a pelagic western North Pacific population of Bryde’s whales with broad distribution, but with seasonal and inter-annual variation in occurrence that imply a complex range most likely linked to changing oceanographic conditions in this region.”

Read the full article at Yahoo News!

Massive Yet Misunderstood, What Is the Ocean’s Midwater?

October 6, 2021 — Imagine climbing through a remote rain forest in the dead of night with nothing but a flashlight to guide your way. There are no trails, no landmarks and no destinations. As you clamber through the trees, the creatures you encounter are bizarre and infinitely better at navigating the darkness, though most of them flee from your light’s bright beam before you can catch a glimpse.

This is what it’s like to explore the ocean’s midwater — the largest and least understood ecosystem on Earth. With more than a billion cubic kilometers of living space, this section of the ocean between the surface and the seafloor holds more species, animal biomass and individual organisms than anywhere else on the planet.

“There are millions of animals down there, no matter where you go,” said Karen Osborn, a zoologist and curator of marine worms and crustaceans at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “It’s not a couple of jellies here and there, it’s millions and billions of animals, and they’re all just as interesting as anything we have up here.”

Unlike rain forests, the deep sea is extremely difficult for humans to study, let alone travel to. Few people — most of them scientists like Osborn — have directly witnessed the midwater’s menagerie through the windows of deep-diving submersibles, making it difficult to garner support for conservation and research.

And yet, each time we descend into the depths of the ocean, we discover new species, new medical and tech applications and ecological connections beyond our imagination.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine

 

Open Wide: Deep-Sea Fishes That Are Built to Eat Big

February 1, 2017 — We’re about 600 to 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. It’s cold, it’s dark and it’s slow down here. If you’re lucky, it’s blue in the daytime and black at night. And the deeper we go, the darker it gets.

Welcome to the twilight zone, fishies.

There’s not much to eat and no green plants growing either. Here, you eat what you can get, and find a way to eat it, or you starve.

It’s weird down here, in the mesopelagic zone of the deep sea. Creatures can be sluggish, but they are well adapted. Some use big eyes to find prey. Others make their own flashlights. Big mouths help predators eat big prey. That may be why barbeled dragonfishes have special head joints that allow them to open up their mouths 120 degrees and swallow big prey whole. This flexible head joint, described for the first time in a study published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, is unlike any other known to science.

Read the full story at the New York Times