Deepest fish ever caught on camera off Japan
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
To those who don't know: "The Culture" is a... society(?) of godlike AI ships/minds from the series of SF books by Ian M. Banks.
SpaceX named their landing barges after Culture ships too, the "Of Course I Still Love You", "Just Read The Instructions" and "A Shortfall of Gravitas".
> It rests on the particular molecular mechanism they use in their tissues to withstand crushing pressures. To go deeper would require fish to evolve some other mechanism, the team tells the journal PNAS. The all-important molecule is a so-called osmolyte called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). It is what gives fish their “fishy smell”. TMAO acts to stabilize the proteins fish use to build and maintain their cells. Without its presence, the proteins would be distorted by the high pressures found at depth and stop functioning.
Other organisms like crustaceans are able to occupy deeper parts but they use 5 different osmolytes for this purpose whereas fish have only ever been observed using this one.
Is this somewhat a coincidence or is this the beauty of the metric system?
On other hand 1kg being equal to 1 litre of water is by design in metric system.
Other happens stance is that pressure on surface is about 101 325 pascals.
So things work out that way...
The kg was initially defined by the mass of the water, but as the kg has been redefined it's drifted a tiny bit.
With base 12 SI units at least some argument for imperial units would be gone, that is that some of their ratios are easy fractions. Not that this makes sense since the ratios of different imperial units are different random numerical values, and nothing prevents using fraction notation with metric units
If this kind of thing interests you at all, I highly recommend it. I didn’t know much going in, but found it fascinating.
I remember James Cameron’s dive and the main life pictured was crustaceans. I’ve also read they are a significant amount of life in underground aquifers [1] was crustaceans, which also had blind reptiles which also fed on crustaceans and had transparent skin similar to those snailfish. I’m curious what makes them so unique to flourish in these sorts of places.
[1] https://www.americanscientist.org/article/creatures-of-the-d...
as far as blindness, there’s not really visible sunlight reaching there, so sight probably doesn’t do a lot, and eyeballs are squishy.
This is why when you bring them to the surface quickly they die from the sudden decrease in pressure. As to eyes bioluminescence is common in the deep and nothing would bother if nobody had eyes.
How long does that take?
The problem is gasses both dissolved in tissues which causes cellular scale damage (Aka the bends) and internal pockets of air such as in swim bladders which can rupture.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26423203
It says that fish use the TMAO protein to protect themselves from pressure. But other organisms use a combination of multiple proteins and that apparently lets them survive higher pressures.
So it seems the fish would basically need to re-evolve how to handle pressure, but in a different way, to be able to go deeper.
So while there may not he mechanical stress on the fish, their proteins may not function correctly at high pressure.
Your affectionately, a regular, concerned, human.
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/absolute-dynamic-viscosit...
TMAO (Trimethylamine N-oxide) is found in the tissues of marine crustaceans and marine fish, where it prevents water pressure from distorting proteins and thus killing the animal. The concentration of TMAO increases with the depth at which the animal lives; TMAO is found in high concentrations in the deepest-living described fish species, Pseudoliparis swirei, which was found in the Mariana Trench, at a recorded depth of 8,076 m (26,496 ft).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoliparis_swirei
> Compared to shallow-water snailfish, Pseudoliparis swirei has several unusual adaptions for its dark and high pressure habitat, including transparent skin that lacks pigment, certain organs and eggs that are enlarged, the muscles are thinner, the ossification of its bones (notably the skull) is incomplete, it appears to have little or no ability to see, there are mechanisms that allow proteins in its body to still function, and differences in the cell membranes for maintaining their flexibility.
Ok that’s saying something.