Here, on one of 21 dives Baldwin and her colleagues made just off the island of Curacao, was another prize, another species probably new to science. Then the sub dropped. The groggy fish floated out of the crate, roused and wriggled off into the dark.
“There’s always one that gets away,” Baldwin said later in her office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where a taxidermied swordfish presides from high atop the back wall. But at least a half-dozen newly discovered species did not escape the milk crate this summer.
At the surface, Baldwin photographed each fish and snipped tissue for DNA analysis, to see if the fish were indeed new to science, as she suspected.
While much of the ocean remains a vast unknown and no doubt full of unseen creatures, most of the Caribbean has been well surveyed. Pulling new species from this sea was “a huge surprise,” Baldwin said. “Everyone thought, ‘Been there, done that.’ ”
Baldwin is one of a handful of scientists exploring a little-studied twilight zone known as mesophotic, or “middle light,” reefs. Although they lie more than 200 feet below the surface, these reefs resemble their colorful, shallow-water cousins. Big barrel sponges, waving blue sea fans and soft yellow corals thrive, as do bright fish familiar to snorkelers whose rear ends poke above the waves.
“You could put somebody in a submarine, blindfold them, put them in front of a beautiful deep-reef environment and they wouldn’t know the difference,” Baldwin said.
A few intrepid explorers began diving down to deep reefs in the 1980s, most notably deep-scuba expert Richard Pyle in Hawaii. But only in the past few years have scientists such as Baldwin begun dipping into the twilight zone in earnest.
That’s because conventional scuba gear limits dives to 200 feet. And technology made famous by the deep-sea submersible Alvin in the 1960s allowed explorers to plunge to amazing depths, far beneath the twilight zone.
“If people come up with that kind of submersible money, they go right past this zone,” said Pyle, based at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
“We’re talking about areas that have never been looked at before, for the most part,” said Sylvia Earle, one of the world’s most prominent ocean advocates and an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. “The distance between 200 feet and 1,000 feet [deep] is perhaps the most neglected part of the ocean.”
Researchers need a ride
Baldwin’s voyage to Curacao began with a curious phone call in September 2010. “If you don’t have half an hour, don’t start talking,” said the voice belonging to Adrien “Dutch” Schrier, who owns a resort, an aquarium and a dolphin-encounter business on the island.
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