- If we put that migration onto a human scale,
it'd be the equivalent of you running a 10K twice a day.
Once for your supper and once before you went to bed.
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This vertical migration of animals serves as a vector
where that carbon gets consumed, moved deep in the ocean,
through the food web
and then of course excrete it
where it makes a really rapid descent to the sea floor,
after it's gone through this sort of biological elevator
and amplifies that sequestration process.
It's really interesting because these twilight zone animals
have largely been out of human sight and interests,
but there have been fisheries,
begun in several countries and being proposed in others
to provide fish oil and fish meal
for farmed fish and for human supplements.
And so we really are in a bit of a race
to understand the biology of these animals
before they're exploited.
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Many animals in the ocean undergo vertical migrations,
where they move to the surface to forage at night,
where there's a lot of plant life,
and then they migrate down into the deep ocean
where there's limited light to hide from their predators.
So it's this real balance between finding enough food
while avoiding becoming dinner.
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Another important process
that these migrations have a role in,
is carbon export.
They serve as a biological conveyor belt
that moves energy from the surface to the deep sea,
which is a important part
of how carbon is sequestered in the deep sea
and removed from the atmosphere.
We're just beginning to understand
what role this vertical migration plays,
but it may account for most of the vertical transport
of carbon in the ocean.
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Which is a surprisingly short amount of time
that we've been looking at this ecosystem
and discovering new species, nearly every outing.
And so it's just sort of a Pandora's box of things
we have yet to learn and consequences.
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We know that these animals are critically important
in the food web.
They play a Keystone role as a food resource
and so that's something we really need to be cognizant of,
that when we fish these animals,
we are having an impact
on those other animals that we also fish.
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