As part of the Fall Enrichment Program Dr. Luiz Rocha, Curator of Ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco delivers a keynote lecture, ‘Into the Twilight Zone.’
We know more about the moon than about some places in our oceans. The Twilight Zone of coral reefs is among those places that we know very little about. These are reefs that lay between 60-150m (200-500 feet) depth and are home to a diverse animal community, but remain virtually unknown because they are very hard to explore. Submarines are not the right tool for the job: when you get close to those reefs with one, the critters in it quickly hide. Traditional scuba diving limits you to the top 40m, so scientists rarely venture to those depths.
The California Academy of Sciences is one of only three institutions worldwide with a team exploring those reefs. To do that, Luiz Rocha and his colleagues use technical mixed gas rebreather diving, which requires hundreds of hours of training. The result? We are finding species that are new to science at an unprecedented rate (on average about 4 new species per hour of exploration). But it’s not just the novelty that excites us. For decades those deeper reefs were thought to serve as a “refuge” for threatened shallow coral reef animals. However, our surveys are showing that they harbor a unique and also threatened community. These results are changing the way we manage and conserve coral reefs throughout the world.

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