Filming the Kermadec Trench:
Yoshinori Ishii
The Nippon Foundation
The Nippon Foundation
Multi-nation party successfully films fish at 7,500m.
Indepth Articles
[Dec. 21, 2009]
Notoliparis Kermadecensis
A joint team from the Ocean Research Institute of the University of Tokyo and University of Aberdeen, the United Kingdom recently succeeded in filming 12 deep-sea fish, known as Notoliparis Kermadecensis, at a depth of 7,561 meters. The film was made in the Kermadec Trench, northeast of New Zealand. The fish greatly resemble the 17 deep-sea Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis filmed in 2008 by the same team at a depth of 7,700 meters in the Japan Trench. While today belonging to different species, these fish may have the same ancestors. It had been thought that very few fish live in the deep sea, but these discoveries in two different trenches have overturned this established theory.
Camera lander aboard the research vessel
This project is a part of the HADal Environmental Science/Education Program, which was begun in 2006 with the support of by the Nippon Foundation. It also receives support from the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). Four researchers from Japan, the U.K., and New Zealand boarded a NIWA research vessel in the Kermadec Trench, where they filmed the fish using a research instrument known as a “camera lander.”
Observation equipment
The Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis filmed last year appear to be a species of scorpion fish and are similar in form to the Notoliparis Kermadecensis fish filmed very recently. Notoliparis Kermadecensis specimens were first collected in 1952 by a Danish research team, and in 2007 the joint project team filmed footage of a smaller number of these fish at 6,900 meters, a shallower depth than the most recent footage.
Participating researchers on the research vessel
It is unclear how such strikingly similar species of fish could have evolved in the Kermadec and Japan trenches, which are separated by more than 10,000 kilometers and are independent of each other. Dr. Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen, leader of the research team, says, “It’s fascinating to find these large aggregations of fish which are so similar yet incredibly isolated from one another. Why these delicate fish have chosen to inhabit such immense depths is still a mystery.” The researchers say that while they lost one of the two landers (the video lander) in the sea, they were successfully able to film the fish using the remaining camera lander.
The Kermadec Trench is a 1,500-kilomter-long trench located to the east of the Kermadec islands of New Zealand, in the South Pacific. Running from south of the Tonga Islands along the east of the Kermadec islands to northeast of the North Island of New Zealand, it is approximately 10,000 meters deep at its deepest.