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Zones of minimum oxygen form at intermediate depth in all the world's oceans as a result of global circulation patterns that keep the water at oceanic mid-depths out of contact with the atmosphere for hundreds of years. In areas where primary production is very high, the microbial oxidation of sinking organic matter results in very low oxygen concentrations at mid-depths. Such is the case with the Arabian Sea, with O(2) concentrations reaching zero at 200 m and remaining very low (<0.1 ml O(2)l(-1)) for hundreds of meters below this depth, and in the California borderland, where oxygen levels reach 0.2 ml O(2)l(-1) at 700 m with severely hypoxic (<1.0 ml O(2)l(-1)) waters at depths 300 m above and below that. Despite the very low oxygen, mesopelagic fishes (primarily lanternfishes: Mytophidae) inhabiting the Arabian Sea and California borderland perform a daily vertical migration into the low-oxygen layer, spending daylight hours in the oxygen minimum zone and migrating upward into normoxic waters at night. To find out how fishes were able to survive their daily sojourns into the minimum zone, we tested the activity of four enzymes, one (lactate dehydrogenase, LDH) that served as a proxy for anaerobic glycolysis with a conventional lactate endpoint, a second (citrate synthase, CS) that is indicative of aerobic metabolism, a third (malate dehydrogenase) that functions in the Krebs' cycle and as a bridge linking mitochondrion and cytosol, and a fourth (alcohol dehydrogenase, ADH) that catalyzes the final reaction in a pathway where pyruvate is reduced to ethanol. Ethanol is a metabolic product easily excreted by fish, preventing lactate accumulation. The ADH pathway is rarely very active in vertebrate muscle; activity has previously been seen only in goldfish and other cyprinids capable of prolonged anaerobiosis. Activity of the enzyme suite in Arabian Sea and California fishes was compared with that of ecological analogs in the same family and with the same lifestyle but living in systems with much higher oxygen concentrations: the Gulf of Mexico and the Southern Ocean. ADH activities in the Arabian Sea fishes were similar to those of goldfish, far higher than those of confamilials from the less severe minimum in the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting that the Arabian Sea fishes are capable of exploiting the novel ethanol endpoint to become competent anaerobes. In turn, the fishes of California exhibited a higher ADH activity than their Antarctic relatives. It was concluded that ADH activity is more widespread in fishes than previously believed and that it may play a role in allowing vertically migrating fishes to exploit the safe haven afforded by severe oxygen minima.