Tom Langbehn

Tom Langbehn is a marine ecologist at the Department of Biological sciences at the University of Bergen, where he is employed as a researcher in the research group for theoretical ecology. He describes himself as an “ocean-going modeler” with a strong interest in ecology, evolution and sustainable fisheries. In his work, Langbehn combines theory and modeling with observations and field experiments.In the TMF Starting Grant project: Systematically rethinking advection and cross-ecosystem subsidies, he will work closely with fellow researcher Marius Årthun, a physical oceanographer from the Geophysical Institute/Bjerknes Center, and with researchers from Cambridge (UK), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the University of Oslo.After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Bremen (Germany), Langbehn had several longer and shorter stays in Norway and Iceland and eventually completed his PhD in Norway at the University of Bergen.  After his PhD, he worked at UNIS in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, and then returned to UiB for a post-doc period.

Langbehn’s project will contribute to a better understanding of nutrient-rich areas in the ocean: Many people have compared the vast open ocean to a desert, thinking that species diversity is found almost exclusively in shallow ocean areas near the coast where basic energy in the form of light is available. After discovering large numbers of small fish in the ocean’s twilight zone (the mesopelagic zone) in various ocean currents in the North Atlantic, Langbehn became interested in the mechanisms behind where these fish settle in the ocean and how they eventually become available to coastal predators through ocean currents.Little or nothing is known about how the huge biomass of mesopelagic species in the open ocean is transported by currents and where this biomass enters the food web. By addressing these unknowns, Langbehn’s research will provide fundamental knowledge that is also relevant for practical purposes, such as adapting management plans to sustainable resource utilization, predicting deep-sea carbon storage and forecasting future species distributions.