The crises of climate change and biodiversity loss are interlinked and must be addressed jointly. A proposed solution for reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and thus mitigating climate change, is the transition from conventional combustion‐engine to electric vehicles. This transition currently requires additional mineral resources, such as nickel and cobalt used in car batteries, presently obtained from land‐based mines. Most...

Demersal deep-sea fish assemblages from islands and seamounts are poorly described, even in the Hawaiian archipelago. Knowledge across all depths, in similar settings, is even sparser for other archipelagos in the central and western Pacific. However, recent remotely operated vehicle (ROV) explorations and archived video from human-occupied submersible dives conducted by the Hawai`i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) provide...

Introduction Botrynema, a genus of medusozoans in the trachyline family Halicreatidae, currently contains two species: B. brucei and B. ellinorae , distinguished by the presence or absence, respectively, of an apical knob as a diagnostic character. However, no study has corroborated if these taxonomic diagnoses have a biological and evolutionary basis. Therefore, in this study we attempted to address the question “do the two n...

The Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) is a vast area of the central Pacific Ocean where the abyssal seabed is a focus for future polymetallic nodule mining. Broad-scale environmental gradients occur east-to-west across the CCZ seabed, including organic matter supply and nodule abundance, factors that influence benthic faunal community structure and function. A network of protected areas across the CCZ, called Areas of Particular E...

Climate change manifestation in the ocean, through warming, oxygen loss, increasing acidification, and changing particulate organic carbon flux (one metric of altered food supply), is projected to affect most deep‐ocean ecosystems concomitantly with increasing direct human disturbance. Climate drivers will alter deep‐sea biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, and may interact with disturbance from resource extraction...

The effective evaluation of trophic interactions in pelagic food webs is essential for understanding food web ecology, conservation biology, and management. We tested the applicability of compound‐specific isotope analysis of amino acids (CSIA‐AA) for (1) characterizing trophic positions (TPs) of nine species from four trophic groups (tunas, squids, myctophids, and euphausiids) within a pelagic food web in the eastern tropical...

Climate change is expected to impact all aspects of marine ecosystems, including fisheries. Here, we use output from a suite of 11 earth system models to examine projected changes in two ecosystem‐defining variables: temperature and food availability. In particular, we examine projected changes in epipelagic temperature and, as a proxy for food availability, zooplankton density. We find that under RCP 8.5, a high business‐as‐u...

Paraliparis hawaiiensis n.sp. is described from the north‐western Hawaiian Islands from two specimens collected at 2196 and 3055 m. It differs from other North Pacific Ocean species in its chin pore arrangement, tooth pattern and body proportions. Although liparid specimens have previously been collected from Hawaii, they were undescribed and are now lost. Therefore, this is the first liparid species described from the archipe...

Owing to the paucity of data on the red muscle of deep‐sea fishes, the goal of this study was to determine the proportions of red muscle in demersal fishes and its enzymatic activities to characterize how routine swimming abilities change with depths of occurrence. Cross sectional analysis of the trunk musculature was used to evaluate the proportion of red muscle in 38 species of Californian demersal fishes living at depths be...

Video and photographic images of snailfishes (Liparidae) collected by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, augmented by specimens collected simultaneously, were analysed. Nine species in five genera were identified, including Careproctus melanurus , Careproctus ovigerus , Careproctus longifilis , Careproctus gilberti , Careproctus filamentosus , Osteodiscus cascadiae , Nectoliparis pelagicus , Paraliparis dactylosus a...

Of three common macrourids Coryphaenoides armatus and Coryphaenoides yaquinae were collected from 1995 to 1998 at an abyssal station, c . 220 km west of Point Conception, California in the north‐east Pacific (4100 m depth). Coryphaenoides acrolepis was collected from 1997 to 1998 in the San Diego Trough (1200 m depth). Energy storage in all three species was primarily in the liver, which was up to 56% lipid (wet mass) and up t...

Nezumia liolepis and Nezumia stelgidolepis were collected during a National Marine Fisheries Service 1997 groundfish survey along the Pacific coast of North America. Bottom trawling was conducted from 188 to 1260 m depths. Nezumia liolepis were collected from 581 to 1247 m (3·4–5·7°C) and N. stelgidolepis from 285 to 555 m (6·0–8·4°C). The two species had distinct depth and temperature distributions and the majority of the spe...