In shallow water,basically our apex predators that you might be familiar with
are sharks or large fishes like jacks, groupers, snappers, things like that.
In the deep sea, sharks are still sometimes the apex predators.
More often than not, though, when you're talking about things that live in and around the bottom,
you are also talking about invertebrate apex predators.
There's really something pretty extraordinary about coral predation in the deep sea.
Things we see eating coral polyps, like sea stars feeding on the same colony year after year.
In addition, there are cephalopods, the octopuses and squids that feed on animals on the seafloor as well.
Moderate to large fishes, they aren't as common, but fishes can be apex predators as well.
Ultimately, if all the fish disappeared, marine environments everywhere, from coastal environments all the way to the deep sea,
would become unbalanced and it could cause ecosystem collapse.
We're in the very early stages of trying to understand the ecosystem dynamics of predation in the deep sea.
Very little is known about how the food web actually fits together.
We know way more about the shallow water environment in terms of
trophic cascades and keystone species, for example, than we do in the deep sea.
And so, by doing these observations, by recording behavior such as carnivory,
we can start building up that understanding and putting those pieces together of these complex food webs.
Something that we talk a lot about on this expedition is how incredibly long lived these species are.
You know, very rarely have I gotten to get a glimpse of sharks in the deep sea,
but large sharks can live for several hundred years, which is absolutely amazing to me.
So, if one animal gets removed by bycatch or by hook and line or any of these extraction techniques,
because they're extremely long lived, it takes a long time to replace that individual.
And we're looking at multiple individuals over large scales. That could be an incredible impact on the ecosystem.
Most of the areas we're looking at have been part of marine protected areas or marine reserves,
and these are basically set aside from large amounts of anthropogenic impacts
like direct fishing pressure and environmentally destructive practices.
Inside of marine protected areas, hopefully it's a refuge, but these aren't islands unto themselves,
they are just a piece of the larger ocean. So it's important to have large-scale population integrity.
A lot of what we're trying to understand is what kind of habitats exist down there that might be able to support predators,
and understanding the dynamics of populations and organism distribution in the deep sea
is useful to park managers to try to understand what resources they have available,
and determine where corals and sponges and large, deepwater fishes might occur.
We're really trying to get a handle on identifying what is in these deep-sea environments,
so that they can be conserved for future generations.