Scientific "unboxing" of a mysterious underwater world

By Vox

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Down where the light starts to fade — between around 30 and 150 meters below the ocean surface — there are mysterious "mesophotic coral ecosystems," also known as "deep reefs." These ecosystems are hard to dive down into, and therefore hard to study, so we still don’t know much about them. Like even what creatures live there. To learn more, Luiz Rocha, a curator of ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences, dove down into the depths in Palau, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and French Polynesia between 2016 and 2018 and left behind scientific devices known as ARMS (Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures). Those structures spent almost a decade becoming encrusted with deep reef life, slowly turning into mini versions of the reefs themselves. Earlier this year, Rocha and colleagues from several institutions returned to Palau to retrieve the ARMS and unwrap them like scientific presents. Vox's Byrd Pinkerton, host of the Unexplainable podcast, went along to watch that process. Rea

Tags: vox.com, vox, explain