WHOI Wants Everyone To 'Keep It Weird'

“The ocean twilight zone plays a critical role in the health of our planet,” said Samuel Harp, WHOI’s vice president for advancement and chief marketing officer. “Yet almost nobody has heard of it, and even fewer will ever see it with their own eyes. So how can we make people care what happens there?”

The answer, according to Mr. Harp, is to help people relate to the weird and wonderful characteristics that help these creatures survive—and thrive—in the twilight zone. Creatures like the fangtooth, which is known for having the largest tooth-to-body size ratio in the animal kingdom.

There’s also the angler fish. When a male angler fish finds a mate, he latches onto her with his sharp teeth, only to find his entire body slowly absorbed into the female’s body until only his reproductive organs remain. Or the popular, bioluminescent strawberry squid, which has two distinct eyes, one for looking up toward the surface and the other to peer down into the darkness. The internet fact-checking website Snopes reported that the strawberry squid does in fact exist, despite its otherworldly appearance.

“All of us know what it feels like when someone calls us weird,” said Heidi Sosik, science lead of WHOI’s Ocean Twilight Zone Project. “Kids as young as 5 already understand that in our society, being weird is often viewed as a bad thing. We want to turn that idea on its head and show that weird is what drives innovation and creativity and is something that should be celebrated. We see the weird creatures of ocean twilight as perfect examples of what makes weird, wonderful in all of us, as well."

Researchers believe that the twilight zone is home to more life than all the world’s fisheries combined. One twilight zone denizen, the bristle mouth fish, is thought to be the most-numerous vertebrate on Earth, with hundreds of trillions swimming in the twilight zone. The twilight zone also plays host to the largest animal migration on earth, one that happens twice each day as vast numbers of its inhabitants journey to surface waters to feed every night, and then return to the darkness and relative safety of the depths during the day.

In doing so, they provide a key critical link in the ocean’s food web that helps maintain a healthy ocean and that supports many commercially important surface species. Life in the twilight zone also plays a critical role in regulating climate by transporting carbon from surface waters to the deep ocean, where it can remain sequestered for thousands of years.

Underpinning this lighthearted campaign is a serious message: Humanity has encountered pristine ecosystems before—and mankind has a near-perfect record of exploiting and altering them, often irrevocably, before their value can truly be understood and appreciated.

For the twilight zone—which commercial fishers have already identified as a potentially rich resource to meet demands for aquaculture feed and for nutraceuticals such as omega-3 supplements—scientists and engineers at WHOI think it is not too late to do things differently. And public awareness of this remote but vital part of the ocean is essential to this effort.

The campaign, which is aimed at children ages 5 to 12 and their parents, features a website that introduces visitors to the ocean twilight zone and to WHOI’s mission to understand it. Young people and adults can also take an entertaining personality quiz that matches them with one of the animals of the twilight zone. WHOI also offers educational materials suitable for middle school classrooms. Additional events are being planned for the fall, and a children’s book is due to be released in spring 2022.

“The ocean twilight zone is a unique and wonderful part of our planet,” Mr. Harp said. “It deserves to be celebrated and protected, just as the things that make each of us unique and wonderful should be celebrated and protected. Everyone benefits when we work together to keep the ocean twilight zone, and ourselves, weird.”