Meeting Abstract
The ocean’s midwaters (the mesopelagic and bathypelagic zones) make up the largest living space on the planet, but are undersampled and relatively poorly understood. The true distribution of many midwater species, let alone the abiotic factors most important in driving that distribution, may not be known. Because collecting specimens and data from the deep ocean is expensive and logistically difficult, it would be useful to be able to predict where species of interest are likely to occur so that sampling effort can be concentrated in appropriate areas. The distribution of a representative midwater fish, the gulper eel Eurypharynx pelecanoides (Teleostei: Saccopharyngiformes), was modeled with MAXENT software to examine the viability of species distribution modeling for midwater fishes. This species was chosen because it is widespread and relatively abundant, easily recognized and unlikely to have been misidentified in database records, and is a true midwater fish, not known to undertake significant vertical diurnal migration.
