#Mesophotic
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bfiguerola.bsky.social
Interested in a PhD at @icmcsic.bsky.social with me & @fonamental.bsky.social? We’re seeking motivated candidates for an #INPhINIT incoming fellowship to study mesophotic coral ecosystems as thermal refuges & holobiont responses across depth gradients. Info: fundacionlacaixa.org/ca/beques-do...
Doctorat INPhINIT
Coneix les 60 beques de doctorat dINPhINIT per a investigadors que vulguin realitzar estudis de doctorat en universitats d'Espanya i Portugal.
fundacionlacaixa.org
December 30, 2025 at 9:09 AM
marineconservation.org.au
The underwater mountain is about 3,000km tall – that's taller than Mt Kosciuszko! 🌊🗻

The top of the 'collapsed crème caramel' pinnacle is reportedly around 30 metres under the surface. It supports a mesophotic coral reef that was only discovered by CSIRO scientists recently.

📷CSIRO.
December 21, 2025 at 5:56 AM
soniajrowley.bsky.social
Gorgonians 🪸 of the mesophotic depths of Pohnpei, FSM 🇫🇲 This year at 78-100m/256-328 ft depth, increases in mean temperature & an invasive sponge have taken hold on Annella Gray, 1858. This illustrates the importance of comprehensive time-series datasets over depth & scale. #gorgonian #mesophotic
December 18, 2025 at 10:31 AM
annieroth.bsky.social
For my latest NatGeo story, I traveled to Guam to watch scientists from the California Academy of Sciences dive a whopping 330 feet to sample a reef in the oceans mesophotic zone. What they found was astounding!

www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...
In the ocean's 'twilight zone,' divers risk their lives in search of mysteries
For deep reef divers, descending into the ocean’s mesophotic layer can feel like exploring the moon. Discovering never-before-seen marine species is part of the mission.
www.nationalgeographic.com
December 16, 2025 at 7:53 PM
dsbsoc-arts.bsky.social
🌊Meet this awesome ArtSea Matchmaking duo 🌊

Guided by Jeremy’s expertise, Cat will create visuals that can support both scientific understanding and public
appreciation.

#sciart #artseamatchmaking #scientificillustration #deepsea #coralreef #deepseascience #marinebiodiversity #scicomm
✨ A collaboration that will reveal the hidden beauty of black corals ✨ 🎨 Cassidy Cat is a New England–born illustrator whose early years spent roaming the rural woods sparked a lasting love for the natural world. She earned her BS in Zoology and a minor in Studio Art from Oregon State University, followed by specialized training in the Science Illustration graduate program at CSUMB. Cat’s work blends scientific accuracy with visual storytelling to help make science accessible to broader audiences. 🔬 Jeremy Jeremy is a Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution where he studies the taxonomy and evolutionary history of the coral order Antipatharia (black corals). 🤝 Together Black corals rarely get the detailed illustrations they deserve, especially when it comes to the tiny structures that matter for taxonomy. That’s why illustrator Cat and researcher Jeremy Horowitz are collaborating on a series that highlights these features in a new way. Guided by Horowitz’s expertise, Cat’s artwork will capture the spines, polyps, and branching patterns that define this deep-sea coral group, creating visuals that can support both scientific understanding and public appreciation.
December 16, 2025 at 7:09 PM
djmaryaleescarlet.bsky.social
My Weakness in Reverse: 1999 (well, ONE) is BEAST teams, and losing out on Moldir last patch stung. Ergo, the reason I did a step-down on the afflatus rung for Reveries...dang, it worked.
#Reverse1999
Screenshot from Reverse: 1999 game mode, "Reveries in the Rain" Stage Mesophotic Zone 200M - I, characters used Kassandra, Sentinel, Fatutu, Nautika, all Insight III, level 60, Resonance 10, level 60 Psycubes.
December 7, 2025 at 9:00 PM
jeromeollier.bsky.social
Mesophotic sponge assemblages in a region undergoing climate change stressors - @frontiersin.bsky.social Marine Science

www.frontiersin.org/journals/mar...
December 5, 2025 at 9:51 PM
katycroffbell.bsky.social
🌊🧪🦑

The role of geological feature shape on the abundance and diversity of deep sea corals

•Feature shape predicts coral distributions; genera show strong feature preferences.
•Banks host the highest coral richness and act as biodiversity hotspots.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Fig. 1. Definitions and examples of each feature shape. Islands are defined as geological features with an emergent terrestrial component. Atolls are also defined as geological features with an emergent terrestrial component but only have low lying sandy land surrounding a central lagoon that has tidal water exchange with the surrounding ocean. Banks are geological features that are fully submerged with a summit shallower than 200 m and most likely have a mesophotic community at the summit given the clear pacific waters. Ridge is an elongated geological feature with multiple peaks all about the same depth but all deeper than 200 m. Conical features are the “classic” seamount with a single peak rising from the abyssal sea floor. Guyots are flat topped features that were at one point were emergent and have had their summits eroded and a carbonate cap over the volcanic substrata and then subsided back below the ocean surface. These features all have a summit depth greater than 200 m. All feature types rise more than 1000 m from the surrounding seafloor.
December 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
jennieacp.bsky.social
Clip from the Tokmakia plateau (NE Lesvos): a mesophotic coralligenous reef with dense red gorgonians and complex bioconstructions. This is the kind of “animal forest” habitat our work focuses on documenting and conserving.
#coralligenous #gorgonians #oceans @skatsanevakis.bsky.social
November 27, 2025 at 9:04 AM
jennieacp.bsky.social
🪸New paper out on mesophotic coralligenous reefs in the NE Aegean. We used side-scan sonar + ROV surveys to map gorgonian assemblages and quantify the impact of marine litter in a Natura 2000 site.
Open access: www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/13...

#marinebiology #Mediterranean #Natura2000 #NEMOTools
November 27, 2025 at 9:04 AM
obialik.bsky.social
Talking about mesophotic reefs in the eastern Mediterranean, the processes shaping them, and the technology that allows us to study them at the IAAS meeting. 🌊
Showing what the SAS imaging allows us to see Talking about the differences between mesophotic and euphotic reefs.
November 25, 2025 at 8:56 AM
angrywaterman.bsky.social
insideclimatenews.org/news/1911202... this deep, low-light ecosystem, known as a mesophotic reef, is largely composed, not of corals, but of vast mounds of rock-like red algae called rhodoliths
As COP30 Unfolds in the Amazon, Brazil Is Drilling for Oil Near the Great Amazon Reef System - Inside Climate News
Environmental advocates warn oil leaks or spills could cause irreparable damage to the unique and understudied ecosystem. They are suing the Brazilian government and its largest state-owned oil produc...
insideclimatenews.org
November 19, 2025 at 10:25 PM
healthyreefs.bsky.social
It was discovered in Clipperton in 2023 that over 70% of mesophotic #reefs (between 30 and 50 meters deep) were suffering from #bleaching caused by colder than usual water.

Cambio climático. ¿Qué es el blanqueamiento por frío en corales?
El blanqueamiento de corales ha causado alerta; esto es lo que advierte los expertos
n9.cl
November 19, 2025 at 4:03 PM
pml.ac.uk
“Past 30m, we’ve no real understanding of what’s out there…”

Prof Kerry Howell is in #AscensionIsland - uncovering hidden #mesophotic life in one of the most remote #UKOTs. Discover the low-cost tech she's using to map these deep habitats, to help support the vast #MPA.
🔗 pml.ac.uk/news/discove...
Discovering hidden ocean life in one of the UK’s most remote Overseas Territories
Professor Kerry Howell is currently in Ascension Island – an isolated volcanic island in the South Atlantic, and one of the UK’s most remote Overseas Territories – leading the next stage of rese
pml.ac.uk
November 19, 2025 at 12:21 PM
biorxiv-ecology.bsky.social
A cold-water coral garden with co-occurring Antipathella subpinnata and Dendrophyllia cornigera in the mesophotic zone of the northern Bay of Biscay https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.14.688465v1
November 16, 2025 at 4:34 AM
biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
A cold-water coral garden with co-occurring Antipathella subpinnata and Dendrophyllia cornigera in the mesophotic zone of the northern Bay of Biscay https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.14.688465v1
November 16, 2025 at 4:34 AM
oceanecol.bsky.social
RGC Postdoctoral Fellow @perez-rosales-g.bsky.social 🌊🌡️🪸 diving deep into mesophotic coral ecosystems at the Hong Kong Laureate Forum 2025. Packed room + great discussion — climate-refuge science resonating far beyond marine circles 🌍

www.hklaureateforum.org/en/the-forum...
November 14, 2025 at 7:16 AM
soniajrowley.bsky.social
Mesophotic life 🪸

1st shot is unedited & an example of the weird 😵‍💫 response of the camera 📷 when taking it beyond the depth rating of the housing 😇

The rest are random research & deco snaps whilst processing expedition image data 📈 🤓

#gorgonian #mesophotic #cowrie #crinoid #rebreather #fsm
November 13, 2025 at 9:02 AM
soniajrowley.bsky.social
@DEEP Outstanding innovation & unveiling of their pilot subsea habitat, the Vanguard in Miami, Florida. DEEP provides so many of us the extended time at depth to explore, understand, share, & protect our natural marine environment 🪸
#deep #mesophotic #vanguard
November 5, 2025 at 8:36 AM
biorxiv-ecology.bsky.social
Environmental filtering shapes patch dynamics across isolated mesophotic reefs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.02.686126v1
November 4, 2025 at 1:32 PM
biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
Environmental filtering shapes patch dynamics across isolated mesophotic reefs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.02.686126v1
November 4, 2025 at 1:32 PM
hannahoish.bsky.social
#FishADay Varicus lacerta Godzilla Goby. Known from mesophotic reef off Curaçao, only known from one specimen. Recent explorations of deep reefs worldwide by submersibles and technical divers have shown there is still LOTS of work for marine fish taxonomists to do.

blog.pensoft.net/2016/06/08/t...
The Godzilla goby is the latest new species discovered by the Smithsonian DROP project | Blog
As part of the Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP), initiated by the Smithsonian Institution, a new goby fish species was discovered in the southern Caribbean. Living at depths greater than conventio...
blog.pensoft.net
October 31, 2025 at 10:02 AM
soniajrowley.bsky.social
Pohnpei Expedition 2025 🪸 Over a decade of research to the mesophotic depths of Pohnpei, Ant & Pakin 🏝️ Phenomenal biodiversity exists here and these expeditions have been an enormous success 🧜‍♀️ Here is a brief summary of this year’s preparations, dive stats, & gas mixes 🤓
October 29, 2025 at 5:56 AM
consbiog.bsky.social
🏝️ Are remote #coralreefs truly safe from #humanimpact?

In the #Maldives, remoteness benefits shallow #reefs 🌊 but not mesophotic ones, showing that depth, not distance, shapes reef #biodiversity.

🔗 doi.org/10.1111/ddi....
October 24, 2025 at 11:30 AM
p7037.bsky.social
Climate change impacts on mesophotic regions of the Great Barrier Reef pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11…
Text Shot: Significance Climate model projections of coral reefs have solely been made using surface temperatures and failed to consider vast areas of deeper, mesophotic reefs at 30 to 50 m. We identify areas of the Great Barrier Reef where thermal stratification insulates deeper reefs from surface warming. These areas may act as genuine deep-water refuges under some warming scenarios. These refugia arise where thermal stratification insulates deeper reefs from surface heatwaves. Even though many shallow species are not found in deeper areas, refugia should help protect mesophotic species. However, this protection fails to maintain today’s temperatures beyond mid-century. Worse, if society follows higher-end emissions, we find that coral mortality is likely to be high even at mesophotic depths.
October 19, 2025 at 5:10 PM