Wednesday October 26, 2022
PhysOrg —
Off the coast of Norway, a marine research vessel is on an important mission. A group of researchers aboard the ship are watching closely as a giant steel wire with a fine-meshed trawl net at the end is rolled out. With each rotation, the trawl net is lowered deeper and deeper into the sea, and somewhere between 200 and 1,000 meters below the surface in what is known as the mesopelagic twilight zone, the wire fully extends and reaches its goal.
Like a large fishing net, it sifts the seawater for living organisms in search of knowledge about a place on Earth that we know less about than outer space.
This North Atlantic deep sea fishing expedition is part of a research project funded by the European Commission. The project aims to investigate whether the fishing industry can target some of the many species found in the mesopelagic zone without repeating the many disasters in fishing history: poor management resulting in overfishing, the destruction of ecosystems, and the collapse of biodiversity.
One of the researchers looking for answers in the project is Professor J. Rasmus Nielsen from the National Institute of Aquatic Resources at DTU Aqua, who processes some of the information collected by the marine research vessels along with his colleagues.