Lots of fish build nests and many do so near one another such that neighbours can help one another out. These nesting neighbourhoods can get quite large but now a new finding is revealing a fish neighbourhood that is orders of magnitude larger than anything we’ve ever seen before.
A busy neighbourhood
The neighbourhood in question is composed of icefish which, as their name implies, dwelling in the frigid Weddell Sea near Antarctica and are highly resistant to bitterly cold temperatures. The researchers saw individual fish guarding bowl shaped nests and noticed that they were rather densely packed together. Further examination revealed that the breeding colony just kept on going and going for as far the divers could see. Realising that casual examination would not be enough to work out the size of the colony, the team arranged for camera arrays to be towed behind four boats. After going back and forth through the ocean for ages they determined the size of the colony to be utterly enormous.
The nesting community covers 240 square kilometres and has 60 million active nests with an estimated 104 billion eggs. The fish biomass is 60,000 tonnes. In short, this is A LOT of fish. Indeed, a colony of this size has to be regionally (if not globally) important... and nobody even knew it was there!