It’s rare that a study on fish provides a clean, operational model for understanding disparate human systems, but the recent telemetry data on the bigscale pomfret is an exception. Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, publishing in the Marine Ecology Progress Series, confirmed the fish is a permanent resident of the ocean’s mesopelagic zone (the so-called “twilight zone,” between 650 and 3,300 feet deep). They also confirmed its daily vertical migration—deep by day to avoid being seen, shallower at night to feed.
The critical data point, however, was the correlation between migration depth and water clarity. In the clearer Sargasso Sea, the fish travel deeper. This isn't just trivia for marine biologists. It’s a precise, data-driven illustration of risk management in a complex system. The pomfret is a key mid-sized predator, a conduit for energy between the deep ocean and surface hunters like sharks and tuna. It is, in functional terms, a missing link. Not in the simplistic, evolutionary sense often debated online, but as a critical piece of biological infrastructure connecting two otherwise isolated ecosystems. Without it, the system is less efficient.
This pattern—the identification and activation of a critical connector—is not unique to marine ecology. It appears with surprising frequency in systems that seem entirely unrelated, from rural healthcare to digital advertising. The connector itself is often unglamorous and, until it’s operationalized, functionally invisible.
The Systemic Arbitrage of the Missing Link
The Human Variable as Systemic Bridge
Consider the recent public health initiatives in North Dakota. In 2023, the state legislature created a task force to formalize the role of the Community Health Worker (CHW). Since then, organizations like Coal Country Community Health Center and Altru Health System have hired their first-ever CHWs. These are not clinicians. They are frontline public health staffers who, in the words of Rebecca Quinn from the University of North Dakota's Center for Rural Health, "serve as a bridge to healthcare."
The data on their function is qualitative but clear. A CHW like Melissa Stern in Hillsboro initiates a clinic garden to address food insecurity or a transportation program for a county with limited options. Others, like Kaylee Caspers and Kylee Schmiesing, report spending a significant portion of their time simply explaining what their job is. This anecdotal data point is telling. The role is so new, so fundamentally a gap-filler, that the system itself hasn't yet developed the vocabulary to describe it. These workers are the human equivalent of the pomfret: a conduit connecting isolated individuals struggling with chronic conditions to systemic resources like Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance. They are the missing link between a diagnosis and a manageable life.
A similar dynamic, with a different set of variables, played out in Malawi. For years, archaeological fieldwork there followed a standard "extractive" model. Knowledge and materials were mined from a location and exported, with artifacts from northern Malawi ending up in the National Repository (nearly 300 miles away from the excavation sites). The local community, the source of the heritage, was disconnected from its final disposition. The system was broken.
In 2024, an archaeologist organized the first workshop for Malawian community members to visit the repository and handle remains from their own area. The initial catalyst for this shift, however, was a classic methodological problem. During a field school, local community members approached the research team asking for jobs. The lead archaeologist admitted to an initial hesitation rooted in "elitist ideas" about scientific protocol. But the practical need for labor created an opening. A local crew was hired, a team that grew to over 50 people—to be more exact, a team that started with a few individuals and expanded to more than fifty as trust and mutual benefit were established.
This act of hiring, of direct economic and social integration, became the missing link. It transformed the community from a passive resource bed into an active project stakeholder. The subsequent workshop was the logical conclusion of activating that link.
I've looked at hundreds of reports on project management and resource allocation, and this particular pattern is a classic indicator of an undervalued asset. The "elitist ideas" are a proxy for a systemic blind spot. The value of local integration was always there, but it wasn't on the balance sheet, so it was ignored. The project's efficiency and social ROI increased dramatically once that non-traditional asset was finally leveraged.
This brings us to a crucial point about how these connectors are perceived. We can attach a satellite tag to a pomfret and generate precise, quantitative data on its movement. The value it provides to the ecosystem can be modeled. But how do you quantify the net present value of a CHW helping a diabetic patient in rural North Dakota secure stable housing? How do you model the long-term cultural and social benefit of a Malawian elder reconnecting with their village's history? The difficulty in quantifying the ROI of these human links is precisely why they so often remain missing.
The problem of the missing link, then, is often a problem of measurement. This is where the digital realm, with its promise of total quantification, offers a fascinating parallel. Amazon is currently pushing brands to unify their advertising tools on platforms like AWS Clean Rooms. A "clean room" is a secure digital environment where multiple parties can collaborate on and analyze their collective data sets without ever exposing or moving the raw, underlying user information.
It is, in essence, an engineered missing link. The system has two isolated components: brands with first-party data who want to target ads effectively, and a market of consumers and publishers demanding privacy. The clean room is the technical bridge. It allows for advanced audience segmentation and campaign optimization without violating the core trust compact. It’s a purely logical, coded solution to a problem that, in the human world, we solve with trusted intermediaries like CHWs.
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An Audit of the Interstitial
My analysis suggests the core takeaway is not about fish, healthcare, or advertising. It's about system architecture. In any complex system, value is often trapped in isolated pockets. The greatest opportunities for efficiency and growth don't come from optimizing the existing, visible components, but from identifying and funding the unglamorous, often invisible, connectors between them. These missing links—whether a species of fish, a human role, or a software protocol—are frequently undervalued because their contribution is systemic and difficult to isolate on a spreadsheet. They are not the engine, but the transmission. And a system without a transmission is just a collection of parts making noise.
Reference article source：
- The missing link
- In Human Origins Research, Communities Are the Missing Link
- Unlocking AI’s Full Potential: Why Data Collaboration Is The Missing Link
Tags: missing link