In the Deep Sea, Animals Abound | Hacker News Reader

In the Deep Sea, Animals Abound

oceans.nautil.us

70 pointsdnetesn19 comments

Cool article, but it's clear from the numbers that the author was starting with metric measurements, translating them to imperial units, and dropping the originals, because almost every quantity reported would be a rounder number in metric units. I wish they wouldn't do that; to make things clear to Americans and elderly Brits they could put the imperial units in parentheses.

Do you think they're doing that because they haven't considered alternatives like the one you've proposed or because those have been considered and found wanting for their target audience?

Considering it's a pretty lazy way to do it anyway, Hanlon's razor probably applies, rather than any actual or attempted target-audience-appeasement.

Yeah very interesting but I had trouble with the units too. Had to jump out to convert imperial to metric a few times. It really seems like very little effort to provide both units (metric could go in parentheses if imperial is default) I would hope that that wouldn't perturb the target audience too much, but who knows?

Russian fishers are pulling up some unusual deep sea creatures.

https://www.boredpanda.com/fisherman-posts-deep-sea-creature...

This organization fights against deep sea trawling https://www.bloomassociation.org/en/

Most of these are not really unusual, but they are taken with weird perspective, are deformed due to rapid decompression, and their skin is badly damaged. For example #23 seems to be a black scabbardfish [0], which is a very common food fish in western europe, and you can find it in many fish markets. And #35 is just a regular john dory. What do people find bizarre about this? I guess this is the sort of stuff that you are expected to find in any trawling trip.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_scabbardfish

The title is : "In the Deep Sea, Incredible Animals Abound". It's different than the HN title and doesn't mean the same thing.

HN automatically strips some click-baity words from titles on first submission; OP would have to notice then go back and add them in. This is usually a good thing.

Tip for web designers: Either have infinity-scrolling OR a page footer at the bottom, not both.

I'm wondering, why aren't oceans covered in photosynthesizing organisms, like land, or even some stationary ponds are? There's some algae of course but most sunlight seems "wasted". Is it really mechanical (waves break them all up)?

Maybe it's the other bits? Like sure a ton of photonic energy is available, but cyannobacteria need P, N, and other elements like Fe. In fact, I recall something about geohacking by just dumping a bunch of Fe into the ocean to do exactly what you're thinking...

Which species is the apex predator at these depths, where whales and sharks (presumably) don't exist?

Whales, sharks and humans

Some whales are very good divers and sharks can live also in deep waters. They use the area to long distance travels also.

Some sharks are even exclusive from deep waters. I remember the first time I had seen one and it was a kind of a shock. Like a seal made of chocolate, eyes like car lights, a black mouth full of tooth and a poisonous sting.

Whales go to 3000m/10000ft and no further.

The deepest recorded dive of sharks is 3600m.

That leaves an span of more than 7000m where none of these species exist and humans rarely "hunt".

Well, this is the part of the deep sea where animals don't abound :-) There are some really interesting cnidarians here and a few bony fishes that could fill the role.

Giant squid as well, maybe?

From the article: Mariana Snailfish (found at depths beyond 26,000 feet (~8000m):

> These extremophiles only grow to be around 11 inches long, but despite their small size, they are among the top predators of their realm. They consume tiny crustaceans hidden in seafloor sediment.

Dunno about 'apex', but there are some awesome predators down there for sure! (anglerfish, gulper-eel, etc)

I know, I know, oh oh oh!

What do they taste like?

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