2023年9月29日 · Most mesopelagic fish are only a few inches long. But their size does not keep twilight-zone animals from being a powerful force in the ocean. The bristlemouth—a small twilight-zone fish with a large jaw full of spiny teeth—is the most abundant vertebrate on Earth, possibly numbering in the quadrillions.

2018年4月17日 · The twilight zone’s numerous fish may also prove an attractive, protein-rich target. A 2014 acoustics-based study published in Nature Communications suggested that the global biomass of fish in the mesopelagic may be 10 times greater than previously estimated—on the order of 10 billion tons or more. Small, spiky, twilight-zone fish may be ...

The ocean water column is made up of five zones: the sunlight zone (epipelagic), the twilight zone (mesopelagic), the midnight zone (bathypelagic), the abyssal zone (abyssopelagic) and the hadal zone (trenches).

2024年7月3日 · For yellowfin tuna, it’s even more dramatic: They spend 3% of their daily time in the ocean twilight zone, but half their carbon comes from there. Given this discrepancy, it appears likely that yellowfin tuna are foraging at night on mesopelagic fish and invertebrates that are migrating into surface waters to feed.

2024年5月16日 · From the tiniest microbes to the largest fish and everything in between, most of this shadowy world has long remained a mystery—but WHOI’s Ocean Twilight Zone (OTZ) Project is changing that. Reaching from approximately 200 to 1,000 meters (656 to 3280 feet) below the surface and stretching across the global ocean, the twilight or ...

2023年11月7日 · During the day, animals in the DSL inhabit the mesopelagic zone. But when the sun sets, many of these individuals—like fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and others—swim to surface waters to feed. When the sun reemerges over the horizon, scattering light over the surface, they descend back to the twilight zone where they will remain until nightfall.

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2019年5月30日 · In fact, the trait has evolved dozens of times in marine fish, which says a lot about its usefulness for those living in an astral, luminous world that maybe isn’t so dark after all. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and its Ocean Twilight Zone project is among an inaugural class of five visionary non-profit organizations and entrepreneurs ...

2024年11月7日 · The mesopelagic is difficult to access and traditional sampling nets miss many species, like active swimmers that avoid getting caught and fragile gelatinous animals that fall apart. Through the OTZ Project, we developed an “ocean forensics” framework that uses environmental DNA (eDNA)–the genetic traces that animals leave behind as they ...

2018年7月23日 · This is the upper boundary of the mesopelagic zone, which extends 3,280 feet deep before the ocean grows completely dark. There isn’t enough light for photosynthetic plankton to grow in this area of perpetual twilight, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty. In fact, the mesopelagic is one of the most abundant places around.