Jialing Cai Captures Deep-Sea Life in 30m Night Dives, Revealing Earth's Biggest Animal Migration
Updated
Updated · BBC.com · Jun 7
Jialing Cai Captures Deep-Sea Life in 30m Night Dives, Revealing Earth's Biggest Animal Migration
1 articles · Updated · BBC.com · Jun 7
Summary
Award-winning photographer Jialing Cai documents deep-sea creatures during blackwater dives, shooting at night in open water as animals rise from the depths to feed near the surface.
Diving no deeper than 30m, Cai photographs juvenile octopuses, jellyfish, crabs and fish during diel vertical migration—the daily movement of trillions of zooplankton that scientists call the planet's largest migration by biomass.
Her images offer rare views of midwater animals alive in their natural habitat, preserving delicate structures and behavior that are often lost when specimens are collected in nets, researchers Jon Copley and Laura Hobbs said.
Cai began blackwater diving in the Philippines in 2018 at age 19 and has since won Oceanographic's 2023 Ocean Photographer of the Year and the 2025 Female Fifty Fathoms Award.
The work also highlights pressure on the twilight zone, a 200m-to-1,000m ocean layer critical to ecosystems and carbon cycling, where climate change could cut abundance by as much as 40% by century's end.