Oh wow! Bottom fish. First bottom fish.
Of all the bottom fish that we were hoping to see, this was the primo one.
Oh, fantastic.
Bottom fish is a fish that’s caught with bottom fishing gear
and the types of species that are in the bottom fish fishery can vary, but they’re all deepwater snappers and deepwater groupers,
and they are all commercially valuable, obviously, that’s why people are trying to catch them.
There’s one right behind me in Seirios. He’s coming around the front.
There he goes. There he is.
Oh. That was a grouper?
Oh, here comes the grouper.
This data is going to provide us with a little bit better and more precise essential fish habitat designations for the Marianas.
This is a federal requirement of all managed fisheries that they come up with some type of description of the habitat,
and usually that’s a depth range,but also within that depth range, there are places called habitat areas of particular concern.
It sounds like a charm from Harry Potter.
The Okeanos data will likely be used to review or potentially designate a habitat area of particular concern,
which don’t exist in the Marianas because they’ve never had any data to create one.
Each region defines habitat areas of particular concern differently.
So, for example, there’s the discovery of nursery grounds for these fish somewhere.
Well, nursery grounds are considered to be very, very important.
There might be a discovery of a spawning ground, or maybe there’s an area where every single species is represented in very high abundance and it’s very unique.