![]() Since 2013, the California Academy has mounted a series of research expeditions to Twilight Zones in places like Vanuatu, Pulau, Easter Island and Brazil. ![]() “Your top thought when you’re down there,” Luiz Rocha, the California Academy’s Curator of Fishes and the expedition’s co-leader, told me that evening, “is keeping yourself alive.”įew scientists have laid eyes on more unexplored reefs than Rocha, Shepherd and their team. Only a handful of elite technical divers are capable of penetrating the Twilight Zone’s murky abysses. Science’s burgeoning understanding of the mesophotic zone has been hard-won. Since Darwin, biologists have recognized that terrestrial islands are cauldrons of speciation-that, as science writer David Quammen once put it, “geographical isolation is the flywheel of evolution.” Just as the Galapagos teems with unique finches and tortoises, so do the world’s Twilight Zones function as islands of the deep, churning out endemic species by virtue of their solitude. In their profuse and bizarre biodiversity, the world’s Twilight Zones resemble nothing so much as undersea islands. Now it’s becoming increasingly clear that the world’s mesophotic zones harbor a disproportionate share of marine biodiversity. In the past decade, that has begun to change: More than 500 papers have been published about mesophotic reefs since 2010, over twice as many as in the previous 50 years combined. But while conservation has rallied to coral’s cause, deep reefs have long remained out of sight and mind. “I love that you can still do that on this planet,” he said.Ĭoral reefs are among the world’s most imperiled habitats: stressed by climate change, plundered by overfishing, poisoned by pollution. After being underwater for five hours, at depths whose pressure exceeded 200 pounds per square inch, Shepherd seemed drained but satisfied. “It’s awesome to drop off the side of the boat and free-fall onto a place that no one’s ever been before,” Shepherd, aquarium director at the California Academy of Sciences, told me once we'd surfaced and returned to the dive boat, a traditional Phillipines craft called a bangka. The Twilight Zone, known to researchers as the mesophotic or “middle light” zone, is a reef deficient of plant life, a kingdom of plankton-eaters and carnivores. Parrotfish and rabbitfish cede to luminous basslets and goggle-eyed squirrelfish. Familiar hard corals yield to technicolor soft-bodied corals that wave in the current like Seussian fever dreams. Sink below 130 feet or so, however, and you’ll find yourself in a dim new world. The coral reefs that dominate the popular imagination-and the scientific literature-are shallow, sunlit gardens, accessible even to amateur divers. Undiscovered species abound in the Twilight Zone, a global band of deep-water reefs that is little visited and less understood. Some of these organisms had never been described by science. I peered at the animals within: vibrant orange wire corals, diaphanous comb jellies, gobies no longer than a pine needle. Bart Shepherd, one member of this bionic quintet, passed me a mesh sack brimming with specimens, each animal adrift within its own plastic bag like the contents of a snow globe. At 85 feet, I rendezvoused with five ascending divers, their bodies encased in mechanical carapaces of hoses and steel tanks and cameras-more than 100 pounds of gear per person. The light shaded from turquoise to pea-green as the surface receded. One balmy morning off the island of Luzon, the largest landmass in the Philippines archipelago, I backflipped off a narrow-hulled wooden boat in scuba gear and descended into Batangas Bay.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |