Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In addition to these successes, however, there have been failures.
We've had almost no luck, for example, with the delicate hatchetfishes
and lanternfishes or the cephalopods that inhabit the midwater zone—
that space that lies well above the bottom but below the photic zone,
the level penetrated by light from the surface. Within the midwater
zone, we have managed to collect and keep animals such as eelpouts
(
Melanostigma pammelas
and
Lycodapus mandibularis
), slender, three-
to four-inch fish with pronounced lips that look like they're pouting,
but other desired animals have proved elusive.
As encouraged as we were with our very real successes, we found it
sobering to think that thousands of unexplored feet of water lie below
the depth—down to about three thousand feet—we had been work-
ing in. The prospect of keeping animals from those great depths alive
are extremely slim, if possible at all. The animals that live there require
high pressure for the functioning of their physiology—in short, for life
itself.
In the end, although we couldn't have it all, the pioneering R&D
work accomplished by Gilbert and the MBARI crew was key to the
aquarium's ability to display deep-sea animals at all. Without their solid
research, our attempts to present the new frontier of the open ocean
and the deep sea would never have succeeded.
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