Saving Seafood

Changes to Earth’s ‘twilight zone’ could cripple the Ocean’s future

March 15, 2021 –Welcome to the Twilight Zone It’s a real place — but under the sea.

The mesopelagic zone, also known as the “twilight zone,” is a mysterious region of the ocean between 200 and 1,000 meters in depth. It’s sandwiched between the sunlit surface and pitch-dark deep ocean.

A new study shines a light on its formation over geologic time scales, revealing the process is intimately linked with global temperature.

Currently, this is a boon to the creatures that live there. But, as anthropogenic climate change heats up the ocean, this finding suggests the twilight zone and its integral role in the carbon cycle may be negatively affected.

This is bad news not just for the animals that live there, but for people too — a twilight zone in balance is essential for keeping billions of tons of carbon out of our planet’s atmosphere.

Read the full story at Inverse

The Ocean’s Twilight Zone can Feed the World, but at what Cost?

March 25, 2016 — Life in the twilight zone constitutes a huge potential source of fishmeal and Omega 3 fatty acids needed to feed the world population. However, it exists in a kind of “no man’s water”, where there are no rules for fishing. Critical for assessing the resilience of the community and thus develop sustainable management strategies is a lack of understanding of the biological processes in the twilight zone making it impossible to accurately estimate the fishing pressure the stocks can sustain.

There are huge untapped resources of protein in the deep sea, but any potential exploitation should be done with caution, states the research community.

An international research group last year estimated that the so-called twilight zone (200 to 1,000 meters), maintains a community of fish, squid and crustaceans whose biomass far surpasses all the world’s current fisheries.

Furthermore, it is currently estimated that there are more than 1 million undescribed species in the twilight zone. According to the study, the twilight zone contains up to 90 percent of the world’s total fish biomass. There are so many creatures here that if estimates hold, it would be equivalent to 1.3 tons of fish biomass per person on earth, and that excludes squid and krill.

Read the full story at Ocean News and Technology