They live in these very dimly lit deep portions of the ocean and when the sun goes down they
actually swim up miles into special waters where there's a lot more productivity a lot more food
and so they feed on animals in the deep sea and they also avoid being eaten welcome to Wavelengths
where we talk about our planet with experts from Scripps Institution of Oceanography
covering everything from the deep sea to the edge of the atmosphere I'm Kate Furby a marine
biologist and journalist I got my PhD here a few years ago and now I'm back learning more about
what's happening at Scripps I'm here today with Dr. Anela Choy she's an assistant professor at
Scripp's Oceanography she studies deep sea food webs so every night these animals are coming
up from the depths what scale are we talking about for this yeah well let's remember that
these are pretty small animals sometimes they're this big - you know this big and they're swimming
hundreds of feet up and down in the ocean every single day and when you're this big
it's basically like running a marathon every single day just to get your meal and you look
at how everything is connected yeah we look it through how animals are connected to the feeding
so predator prey interactions we look at diet we look at trophic levels which is basically where
in the food web an animal is feeding and how of all of those different steps lead up to top
predators things are pretty complicated in the ocean animals are adapted to eat a wide variety
of different animals because in the deep sea you never know when your next meal is going to come
I could never live there I couldn't either I have snacks in my pocket right now
so how do you do the research that you're doing yeah we rely on a number of different tools to basically
bring us into the deep sea and we use a lot of remotely operated vehicles a lot of deep diving
robots we send down trawls and we also look at the diets of animals who are basically sampling
this mid-water community for us is that we're those that comes in yeah so in this jar is a
really large long nosed Lancet fish I was gonna ask you what the Lance of fish eats but looking
at his face it looks like whatever he wants what do they actually eat well maybe you'll see for yourself
thank you can you remember heavy's this is huge so there's a piece of plastic you can see right
the way along with all of the different prey items in this stomach Kate has some of these
these are hatchet fish oh my gosh wow so there's a large shard of plastic as well and you can see
it has some kind of like biofouling on it so it may have been in the ocean for some amount
of time cool I find it like pretty upsetting that we've found plastic in all of these ocean
ecosystems particularly like the deep sea that's so remote I think it's really important that we
use this knowledge in a positive way and we use it to show people how they are connected
to the deep sea not just through the plastic products that they use every day but you know
the food that we eat the cars that we drive and the planes that we fly the devices that
we use in our pockets every single day a lot of these resources come from the deep sea that's
a really inspirational way to think about the plastic problem I think the idea that
that's really compelling is that the all the ocean animals are connected but we're also part of that
you