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Comment by chr1 | Hacker News Reader

How far is our technology from being able to develop species of fish, that would bring up dirt from ocean floor, doing fertilization by themselves?

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It's almost certainly impossible to create a species of fish that can take things from the ocean floor all the way to the surface for any significant percentage of the ocean. And we are certainly nowhere near having the ability to bionegineer such complex behaviors, we're far enough that you wouldn't even have a reasonable estimate for how long it might take to get there.

Why is it impossible? it can be as simple as a bottom feeder species that goes to the surface to poop, basically like whales, or have cells in their gut that produce fiber making their poop float to surface, or a combination of seaweed that produces floating wood, and a fish that builds nests on it. The second version is probably in reach of current technology.

the average depth of the ocean floor is something like two and a half miles and the pressure at that depth is 400 atmospheres.

Look up the blobfish and how it more or less explodes when taken from the deep ocean.

Very, very few animals can handle the pressure differential between the top and bottom of the ocean. It's pretty much just whales, and they can only do it because they're so goddamn big

You're actually describing whales

Kind of, but i mean if it was a smaller and more numerous species, it could have larger impact.

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