No book currently available treats all of the major animal groups making up the swimmers and drifters of the open sea and their many fascinating characteristics. This book will provide a description of the animals themselves and explain how they are adapted to live in the open ocean environment.
Most of the planet earth (over 60% of it) is deep ocean. Within the oceanic realm are two basic ecosystems, the ocean bottom, a two-dimensional environment containing creatures that creep, crawl, burrow, or lie in wait for prey, and the immense, three-dimensional pelagic region that lies above it, the largest living space on the planet, containing the swimmers and drifters. The deep ocean bottom has been the focus of a lot of excitement over the last 25 years, with many expeditions to the fabulous communities inhabiting the hydrothermal vents at our planet’s oceanic ridges. Just as fascinating are the communities of marine animals that inhabit the oceans’ pelagic realm, and the creatures’ adaptations to an environment devoid of barriers to movement in three-dimensional space. Many people are familiar with the term “plankton”, the tiny plants and animals that drift with the ocean currents. More are familiar with the large pelagic species such as tuna, sharks, and swordfish, not only from pictures or fishing trips, but from the dinner table. The large, highly capable swimming species like tuna and sharks are termed “nekton”. In between the tiny drifters and the strong swimmers are an entire community of animals that are familiar mainly to oceanographers but are the critical link between the small and the large. Animals in the intermediate community are not as capable at swimming as the tunas but are better at it than the small zooplankton. Collectively, the creatures are known as the micronekton and macrozooplankton and they make up one of the largest animal communities on the planet.
The micronekton and macrozooplankton include a variety of different animal groups. Several different families of fishes are represented, many with unusual adaptations such as light organs like fireflies, huge gapes to allow them to swallow prey larger than themselves, and large tubular eyes. Among the invertebrates are crustaceans that can produce clouds of biological light or live inside jellyfishes. Among the jellies are species larger than a meter across and those that can double their population size in a matter of days by reproducing asexually.
To find out about these diverse groups of organisms students and instructors need to access many sources. The intent of this book is to gather the information that is available on the wide array of taxa making up the community and present it as one cohesive whole. The book will cover the physical environment, the different taxonomic groups, how they make a living, their special adaptations, their global distribution, and changes in the communities with latitude. No existing work treats the diverse micronekton assemblage as a community. In particular, information on the invertebrate groups is quite diffuse, restricted to keys or technical journals. The micronektonic fishes are far better described, but the books deal only with fishes. It is time for a synthesis of the information available on the biology of all the groups you will see if you tow a net between the surface and 1000 m. When you bring the net up and look at your catch, you will be looking at a community of co-existing species. Each group has its own way of solving the problems posed by nature, making for wonderful comparisons. This book will combine basic information about the different animal groups as well as their different strategies for solving natures’ challenges.
