Exploring Our Fluid Earth
Teaching Science as Inquiry
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The diversity of life in the ocean is astounding. While most people are familiar with organisms that live near the coastline and can be easily seen, there are many species that live in the open ocean or ‘pelagic’ zone. The pelagic zone can be divided into five zones based on depth: epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadopelagic (SF Table 9.2).
Even though humans rarely travel to depths below the euphotic zone, we have learned a great deal about species that live in the deep ocean through fishing trawls, underwater construction, and scientific research. However the ocean depths are still an exciting new frontier where new species are continuously discovered. As technology allows humans to go deeper and deeper into the ocean depths, we learn more and more about the organisms that live there. SF Table 9.2 shows some of the species that live in each pelagic zone.
Exploring Our Fluid Earth, a product of the Curriculum Research & Development Group (CRDG), College of Education. © University of Hawai‘i, 2021. This document may be freely reproduced and distributed for non-profit educational purposes.