Just 100 meters from Lanzarote's bustling sandy beaches lies the thriving marine animal forest protected for twenty years by the European Union's ban on deep-sea trawling in the region. It is the best preserved and intact forest of marine animals in which for a decade the co-founders of Under The Pole, Ghislain Bardout and Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout have been working with the support of Rolex in their mission to deepen scientific knowledge of the oceans and contribute to its protection.
In his latest series of expeditions, Deeplife, he has explored the forests of marine animals in the mesophotic zone, which is the layer of the ocean from 30 to 200 meters deep.
With the data collected during their expedition in the Canary Islands, the team has demonstrated the abundance of life that exists in these forests of marine animals and have been able to advise the Government of Gran Canaria in its efforts to establish a marine protected area (MPA) that note the depth. This is a crucial step in protecting our oceans.
The members of the Under The Pole team are some of the few people who dive to these depths using state-of-the-art "rebreathers" (a breathing system recycles the gas that divers breathe and allows them to dive deeper and for longer) to to be able to study these habitats that have remained surrounded by mystery. There are many risks and challenges involved in diving to such depths.
Thanks to the experience and knowledge of the Under The Pole team, the first Arctic marine animal forest was discovered. This pioneering discovery took place during the first stage of their Deeplife expeditions in Svalbard where it was understood that these deep-sea ecosystems "are potentially on all coasts of the planet", according to Périé-Bardout.
Under The Pole's efforts to reveal more about this incredible underwater environment are the perfect example of the Perpetual Planet Initiative's mission and its explorations to safeguard the planet's ecosystem. Through complex dives in the Canary Islands, researchers have also identified a new type of amphipod, a type of crustacean similar to shrimp, which is hidden among the coral fronds. This discovery demonstrates the importance of “making the invisible visible” to drive urgent protection of these vulnerable ecosystems.
A marine animal forest is an ecosystem composed of sessile animals that form three-dimensional structures and create the conditions for life to thrive. The most famous example is the shallow coral reef, in which many corals contain photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae, which provide the corals with food from sunlight. At more extreme depths, they may consist mainly of organisms, such as sponges, bivalves, octocorals or black corals, that do not depend on sunlight to survive. Like shallow coral reefs, the marine animal forests of the mesophotic zone provide habitat for thousands of species and, in Bardout's words, "host extremely important biodiversity."
The mission of Under The Pole in Lanzarote was not only to understand and document the pristine forest of marine animals found there, but to use it as a reference with which to compare future places they visit, an objective that Rolex seeks in all its partners in the Perpetual Planet Initiative. They have been using transects to photograph the seafloor and sampling black corals, water and sediments in order to comprehensively map the ecosystem. This deep knowledge of a healthy marine animal forest will serve as a template for researchers to understand the problems they encounter in other forests.
