The open ocean may seem barren, but could its low productivity—transported by currents—fuel rich coastal and shelf ecosystems?
Marine ecology has traditionally viewed energy fluxes as moving from surface waters to the deep sea, and with shelf seas acting as energy sources for the open ocean. DRIFT, a four-year TMF Starting Grant Project (June 1, 2025-2029) led by Tom Langbehn, challenges this paradigm of open ocean deserts by exploring how the incredibly vast biomass of mesopelagic organisms, including small fish, krill, and gelatinous zooplankton, that passively drift with the currents, may sustain feeding hotspots and large predator communities along banks, seamounts, and underwater canyons.
Using mechanistic modeling, oceanographic particle tracking, and data from an 11-day research cruise aboard GO Sars in 2026, DRIFT will map where and how predators capitalize on this hidden food supply from the deep ocean.
The project will also recruit one PhD candidate to work on particle tracking, jointly supervised by Tom Langbehn (BIO) and Marius Årthun (GFI), as well as a postdoctoral researcher who will analyze long-term fisheries and acoustic data. Both positions are for 36 months. The position calls will be advertised in the coming months.
Curious? Learn more: https://bio.uib.no/te/research/advection/
Starting with this article, we aim to include a presentation of one of BIO’s many projects as a regular feature in Bionytt. In the first round, we have asked the research groups to nominate one project each.