The Mesopelagic 2017

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Marine biology

The mesopelagic: Cinderella of the oceans


One of the least-understood parts of the sea is also one of the most important

Print edition | Science and technology The Economist


Apr 12th 2017| Woods Hole

FEW have heard of the mesopelagic. It is a layer of the ocean, a few hundred
metres below the surface, where little light penetrates, so algae do not live.
But it is home to animals in abundance. There are bristlemouths: finger-sized
fish with gaping maws that sport arrays of needle-like teeth. They number in
the quadrillions, and may be the most numerous vertebrates on Earth. There
are appendicularians: free-swimming relatives of sea-squirts a few
millimetres across. They build gelatinous houses several times their body-
size, to filter food from the water. There are dragonfish (pictured). They have
luminescent spotlamps which project beams of red light that they can see, but
their prey cannot. There are even squid and swordfish—creatures at least
familiar from the fishmonger’s slab.

And soon there will be nets. Having pillaged shallower waters, the world’s
fishing powers are looking to the mesopelagic as a new frontier. The UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organisation reported in 2002 that the fish-meal and
fish-oil industries would need to exploit this part of the ocean in order to feed
fish farms. In the past nine months Norway has issued 46 new licences for
vessels to fish there. In September the government of Sindh, a province that
is home to most of Pakistan’s fishing fleet, issued a draft policy on licensing
mesopelagic fishing in its waters. And at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum,
held in March, in Bergen, Norway’s principal port, the session about fishing
the mesopelagic was entitled “the Big Apple”.

On the face of things, biting that apple seems a good idea. The mesopelagic is
home to 10bn tonnes of animals. Cropping a mere 1% of this each year would
double the landed catch of the ocean’s fisheries. Most of this catch would
probably not appeal to human palates. But fish farmers and meal merchants
would lap it up.

The mesopelagic also, however, acts as a carbon pump. Every year it pulls
between 5bn and 12bn tonnes of that element out of the surface waters and
into the depths, where there is a vast reservoir of the stuff. Though currents
which well up from that reservoir return a similar amount of carbon to the
shallows, this cycle still plays an important role as a counterbalance to man-
made global warming.

Deep waters

To try to understand the mesopelagic better, the Woods Hole Oceanographic


Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts, NASA, America’s space agency, and
Norway’s Institute of Marine Research are all embarking on projects to study
it. As ecosystems go, it is an odd one. Its inhabitants are in a state of
perpetual migration, rising to the surface at night to feed, then returning to
depths of between 200 metres and 1km at dawn, to escape predation. It is this
migration, the biggest in the world, that drives the carbon pump. The
nocturnal feasting consumes prodigious amounts of that climate-changing
element in the form of small, planktonic creatures. Then, during the day, the
feasters release part of what they have consumed as faeces. Some of them
also die. These faeces and bodies fall through the water column as what is
known as marine snow, and accumulate at the bottom. Without mesopelagic
predators, far more plankton would die in the surface waters, their bodily
carbon returned rapidly to the atmosphere. The vast harmless reservoir of
carbon in the depths would thus be a little smaller; the damaging burden of
atmospheric carbon a good bit greater.

Until now, the only sensible way to probe mesopelagic activity has been by
sonar. This is, indeed, how the zone was discovered, in 1942, by an American
anti-submarine research project. From their earliest days such soundings
suggested a lot of creatures live in the mesopelagic. They are sufficiently
abundant that the equipment then available saw the zone as a “false bottom”,
beneath which sonar could not penetrate and submarines might thus hide. But
it was subsequent probing by a Spanish expedition, the Malaspina
circumnavigation in 2010, which came up with the current 10bn-tonne
estimate and showed just how big a part of Earth’s biosphere the mesopelagic
actually is.

Sonar is still important for investigating the zone. Norway, which has long
paid attention to the sustainability of its fishing operations, will launch the
third incarnation of Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, the flagship of its marine-research
fleet, in May, with an explicit focus on mapping and understanding
mesopelagic life using the most advanced civilian sonar available. But sonar
can see only so much. WHOI’s goal is to study the zone using robots, which
the institute’s engineers are now constructing.

The largest of these planned devices is called Deep See. It is a sensor-packed


underwater sled weighing about 700kg. One of WHOI’s research vessels will
tow Deep See through the mesopelagic, gathering wide-angle camera footage
and environmental data. When the probe spots something, a second robot will
swim down from the research vessel to explore.

This second device, Mesobot, weighs 75kg and is shaped like a bar of soap.
Unlike Deep See, Mesobot will run untethered. It is designed to hang in the
water column and observe mesopelagic life for extended periods, in particular
by using high-definition cameras to track animals up and down during their
daily migration. WHOI’s roboticists are paying special attention to Mesobot’s
thrusters, ensuring that they do not disturb the life the probe is trying to
video. It will be the first time that the behaviour of mesopelagic animals has
been recorded in a natural setting. Mesobot will also have a special sieve for
capturing organisms in a way that preserves them from the disruptive
pressure change associated with surfacing.
WHOI’s third type of mesopelagic robot will be disposable probes
called Snowclops. These will sink through the water column, measuring the
amount of marine snow at various depths. On its way down, snow is a
potential source of food for other animals. Recording its fate at different
levels is thus crucial to understanding how the carbon pump works.

Combining data from these three types of robots will paint a more accurate
picture of life in the mesopelagic, and thus of its importance to matters
climatic. In collaboration with NASA, WHOI also hopes to find variables
that are observable by satellite and that correlate with the health of the
mesopelagic and the size of its carbon flux. The principal satellite involved
here, if it can survive the Trump administration’s budget proposal to cut its
funding to zero, will be PACE (short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean
Ecosystem). This is scheduled for launch in 2022. Though PACE will not be
able to see directly into the mesopelagic, it will be able to measure, from the
spectrum of light reflected from the ocean, things like rates of plankton
consumption.

The forthcoming decade should, then, serve to start answering the question of
how much fishing of the mesopelagic can be undertaken without disrupting
it—and with it, its role in climate regulation. Once the fleets start hauling in
their catches, the temptation will be to collect more and more. History shows
that such piscatorial free-for-alls usually end badly. In the case of the
mesopelagic, though, regulators will start with a clean slate, and thus a rare
opportunity to agree in advance a way of stopping that happening. Whether
they will take it is another matter.

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