The open ocean ecosystem is like a “Blue Serengeti”. Surviving and finding food here is problematic. If you dive deep, between 200 and 3.000m, you can find your prey in the mysterious and food-rich deep scattering layer. However, many species depend on feeding on the surface of plankton aggregations either at upwelling or downwelling areas. Scattered around the Blue Serengeti, migrating passively with the currents, you can also find oasis in the form of logs, sargassum algae, or sea turtles during their juvenile life stage.

Many pelagic life forms depend on enough “oases” scattered around on the surface of the vast open ocean ecosystem. Loggerhead turtles create a very rich and biodiverse oasis.
One loggerhead in the Mediterranean can host over 120 species, from the seagulls that use it as a resting spot to pelagic crabs, plankton, fish, and even endemic algae. Tens of thousands of “turtle oasis” could answer the Mediterranean paradox of how such an oligotrophic sea can sustain a large biomass of top predators and fishing fleets.