Celebrate World Ocean Month with six minutes of remarkable deep-sea fishes 🌊🎉🐟
Ultrablack skin and extraordinary eyes adapted to the dark, undulating bodies and flickering tails—the ocean's midwater is home to a dazzling diversity of fishes. To celebrate World Ocean Month, dive in and meet some of the spectacular fish species that we’ve encountered over nearly four decades of ocean exploration.
The midwater is a sprawling expanse of open water that lies between the sunlit surface and the deep seafloor. As you descend beneath the ocean’s surface, sunlight turns to twilight. Dive even deeper, and darkness pervades in a realm without sunlight, boundaries, or hiding places called the midnight zone. The midwater is the largest habitat on Earth, but the least explored.
MBARI scientists and engineers are developing and deploying innovative technologies to understand how human actions affect deep-sea animals and ecosystems from the twilight zone to the abyssal seafloor. With advanced robots, we can study these waters in ways we never could before, but even after 38 years, we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding this fascinating habitat and the life that calls it home.
Exploring our blue backyard has revealed our connection to the ocean—how it sustains us and how our actions affect its future. MBARI scientists, engineers, communications staff, and marine operations crew are driven by a curiosity to learn more about the ocean and a passion to protect its future. The ocean needs our help. All life, including us, depends on a healthy ocean.
