In the Weddell Sea near Antarctica, scientists have found the largest colony of fish nests in the world, covering 240 square kilometres
by breaking through them. Purser’s job was to trail a camera behind the ship to image the seafloor. “It’s a normal Canon camera you can buy in any shop… it’s just housed in a €3.5 million frame,” he says.The researchers were doing a routine analysis of the seafloor when they stumbled upon thousands of nests made by Jonah’s icefish , a type of small ray-finned fish typically found in the Southern Ocean. “And then we kept moving for four hours and kept seeing more fish nests,” says Purser.
He and his colleagues estimate that the colony has more than 60 million nests and covers at least 240 square kilometres. “It looked computer generated how structured these nests were,” says Purser. Each nest had one adult fish and about 1500 to 2000 eggs. “We don’t know how long they take before they hatch or even how many will survive,” he says.
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