Dark Fish
Sometimes you run across an aspect of reality and it just completely blows your mind. You’ve heard of dark matter, right? Well, meet dark fish: biologists suspect that up to 95% of the world’s total fish population lives in a deep layer of the ocean that is difficult to detect and we know little about.
An international team of marine biologists has found mesopelagic fish in the earth’s oceans constitute 10 to 30 times more biomass than previously thought.
UWA Professor Carlos Duarte says mesopelagic fish — fish that live between 100 and 1000m below the surface — must therefore constitute 95 per cent of the world’s fish biomass.
“Because the stock is much larger it means this layer must play a more significant role in the functioning of the ocean and affecting the flow of carbon and oxygen in the ocean,” he says.
See also this thread from ocean scientist Andrew Thaler:
There’s a globe-spanning layer of mesopelagic fish that is so dense it distorts SONAR. For decades we had no idea what created the Deep Scattering Layer or why it moved. We still know almost nothing about it.
It’s astounding how much we don’t know about the ocean:
There’s an entire family of whales with at least 22 species that we know almost nothing about.
We know way more about stars that are billions of light years away than about some parts of the ocean a few hundred feet below the surface of our own planet.
See also dark fungi: “By one estimate, there are between 2.2 million and 3.8 million species of fungi — and more than 90% of them aren’t cataloged.”. (via @_zeets & @chadmumm)
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