You are definitely not allowed into the remote office of Luiz Rocha, curator of fishes at the California Academy of Sciences. Using special scuba equipment and techniques, he dives 200, 300, even 400 feet deep in waters off the coast of the Philippines to an ecosystem that few people have laid eyes on, one that usually only submersibles can reach: the twilight zone, a bustling reef clad almost entirely in darkness. He and his colleagues dive so deep, in fact, that to keep from getting the bends, they have to take several hours to carefully ascend bit by bit, sometimes affording them only 10 minutes to study an ecosystem almost unknown to science.
But the twilight zone specimens that Rocha and his colleagues bring back to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, including unique corals and fishes, are helping them piece together a snapshot of one of the weirdest habitats on Earth. Oddly, for a place where little light penetrates, corals thrive here, a stark contrast to the glittering shallow reefs of the world,
