The tiny fish that safely manages more carbon than a rain forest

They don’t do this by accident, they use their superpowers

It is their life’s work, to maintain and sustain the ocean pastures that offer them a home and food

Here’s a story reposted from the Tico Times of Costa Rica (2014). It gives us a glimpse of why we must work not merely to conserve our oceans but more importantly to restore our ocean pastures to historic levels of health and abundance. This is not an insurmountable or astronomically expensive task.

As we work to restore the oceans, with but tens of millions dollars of our work, the restored ocean pastures will return such abundance of fish to feed our world that together we will end world hunger in a decade or less. In the bargain, in partnership with caring ocean life, like these tiny fish, we will repair our blue planet’s climate at the same time.

Something most people will never experience: an up-close glimpse of the elusive and extraordinary lantern fish. (Shawn Larkin/The Tico Times)

Lanternfish, sardina roja in Costa Rica

When my daughter reached down and picked up the little fish from the surface of the deep blue sea, she asked me what kind it was. Since I knew she was wanting something more specific than sardina roja, I told her I didn’t know. Neither did the old and famous marine biologist standing next to us who has sailed and dived the seven seas for seven decades. We had just spent hundreds of hours filming the largest dolphin pods known, for the biggest documentary ever made about the oceans – but no one had thought to identify, or even really look at, the fish that made the vast bait balls that the dolphin megapods, and much more, feasted on. So I took this photo.

Turns out the photo was the first known identification of the sardina roja in Costa Rica. The books showed it to be the little lantern fish, Symbolophorus, the secret to the Costa Rican deep-carbon sink: They make carbon sink to the bottom of the sea with their fins.

Osa Penninsula Costa Rica

Little lantern fish are smaller than your finger and live so deep that very few people have ever seen one alive, unless you hang out southwest of the Isla del Caño Biological Reserve, off the shores of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. Further offshore than the island, where the continental shelf plunges to the deep sea, the sardina roja stain the surface of the blue sea red.

SONAR echogram of night and day migration of tiny ocean life that work to sustain their ocean pastures.

This is the only place known in the world where these fish can be reliably seen alive. People using sonar see them every night. On sonar, these fish – the most numerous animal on the planet with a backbone – swim in such thick clouds that they appear to be the bottom of the ocean. Every night, all around the world, this false bottom of fish rises up just a bit from the depths of the sea, eats heaps of carbon-rich plankton, and then drops back down again and poops carbon.

During a week in which climate change has taken center stage, in a world in which carbon emissions have become an enormous ecological threat, and in an era when great minds are searching for ways to achieve carbon sequestration to remove it from the atmosphere, it is amazing to consider that these tiny lantern fish sink far more carbon than all of the world’s forests combined. Because offshore Osa is the only place in the world where these fish can be reliably seen and studied, it offers an astounding opportunity to better understand the crucial little lantern fish carbon-sink dynamics and help us negate having burned way too much carbon.

During the shoot of the biggest dolphin documentary ever made, we sailed at night off the shores of Osa, watching the dolphins glowing and throwing brilliant trails of bioluminescent plankton. We saw that on the windless and smooth surface glowed countless lights brighter than the spectacular stars above, even without the movement that makes most bioluminescent organisms light up. The famous badass underwater cameraman who was with us said it must be the reflection of the stars. I said it might be sea worms or spawn. My daughter said it was little lantern fish. We laughed. She grabbed a net, went astern, and dipped it full of little lantern fish.

On dark nights, lantern fish fill the sea off Osa with lights. This glittering surface mesmerizes those lucky enough to glimpse this extraordinary phenomenon. But they are not just beautiful – these fish are tremendously powerful, too. If we can learn more about their secrets, they may help Costa Rica and the world light the way to carbon neutrality, and perhaps a brighter future.