When my
daughter reached down and picked up the little fish from the surface of the
deep blue sea, she asked me what kind it was. Since I knew she was wanting
something more specific than sardina roja, I told her I
didn’t know. Neither did the old and famous marine biologist standing next to
us who has sailed and dived the seven seas for seven decades.
Something most people will never experience: an up-close glimpse of the elusive and extraordinary lantern fish.
Shawn Larkin/The Tico Times
We had just spent
hundreds of hours filming the largest dolphin pods known, for the biggest
documentary ever made about the oceans – but no one had thought to identify, or
even really look at, the fish that made the vast bait balls that the dolphin
megapods, and much more, feasted on. So I took this photo.
Turns
out the photo was the first known identification of the sardina
roja in Costa Rica.
The books showed it to be the little lantern fish, Symbolophorus,
the secret to the Costa Rican deep-carbon sink: They make carbon sink to
the bottom of the sea with their fins.
Little
lantern fish are smaller than your finger and live so deep that very few people
have ever seen one alive, unless you hang out southwest of the Isla del Caño
Biological Reserve, off the shores of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. Further
offshore than the island, where the continental shelf plunges to the deep sea,
the sardina roja stain the surface of the blue sea red.
This is
the only place known in the world where these fish can be reliably seen alive.
People using sonar see them every night. On sonar, these fish – the
most numerous animal on the planet with a backbone – swim in such thick clouds
that they appear to be the bottom of the ocean. Every night, all around the
world, this false bottom of fish rises up just a bit from the depths of the
sea, eats heaps of carbon-rich plankton, and then drops back down again and
poops carbon.
During
a week in which climate change has taken center stage, in a world in which carbon emissions
have become an enormous ecological threat, and in an era when great minds are
searching for ways to achieve carbon sequestration to remove it from the
atmosphere, it is amazing to consider that these tiny lantern fish sink far
more carbon than all of the world’s forests combined. Because offshore Osa is
the only place in the world where these fish can be reliably seen and studied,
it offers an astounding opportunity to better understand the crucial little
lantern fish carbon-sink dynamics and help us negate having burned way too much
carbon.
During
the shoot of the biggest dolphin documentary ever made, we sailed at night off
the shores of Osa, watching the dolphins glowing and throwing brilliant trails
of bioluminescent plankton. We saw that on the windless and smooth surface glowed
countless lights brighter than the spectacular stars above, even without the
movement that makes most bioluminescent organisms light up. The famous badass
underwater cameraman who was with us said it must be the reflection of the
stars. I said it might be sea worms or spawn. My daughter said it was little
lantern fish. We laughed. She grabbed a net, went astern, and dipped it full of
little lantern fish.
On dark
nights, lantern fish fill the sea off Osa with lights. This glittering surface
mesmerizes those lucky enough to glimpse this extraordinary phenomenon. But
they are not just beautiful – these fish are tremendously powerful, too. If we
can learn more about their secrets, they may help Costa Rica and the world
light the way to carbon neutrality, and perhaps a brighter future.
Source- www.ticotimes.net
