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New Deep Ocean Creatures
An anonymous reader writes "NORFANZ was a recent expedition that went really deep into the ocean in the search for new species that live in the largely unchartered waters of the Tasman Sea. Check out the site and some very cool pics."
It turned out to be a rotting corpse of a giant sea squid.
...I heard about this over the weekend. Giant something or other... Looks like it has been one hell of a week to be a marine biologist, eh?
+ G to tha Izzo, A to tha Tizee, Talking Giz-oat, Ya'll Bettah Feel Me... +
"How do they taste?"
Check out some of the older fish determination guides: some of them actually have information on the tastiness listed with each fish. These won't be in the guides though.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
to own a "coffinfish", a species very close in look and character can be had easily. The marine fish is known as a "frogfish" and are highly interesting creatures to keep in a dedicated reef-tank.
Just FYI
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Here's the RedNova article on it.
The BBC had this story a week or two ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3017078.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3034520.stm
I didn't see the picture of the fangtooth on the link provided in the story above so wanted to share. Perhaps I just missed it? A couple of the other pics are different too I think.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
In the Pacific Spookfish caption it says:
"In the USA it is known as a Long-nosed Chimaera while in Europe they use the common name Cyrano Chimaera, named after the fictional French character Cyrano de Bergerac, who had a very long nose"
Savien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) is not a fictional character.
I emailed this nitpick in to the website, with a few details of de Bergerac's biography. Perhaps it will be fixed anon.
No, this is not about the large piece of blubber that they found on the beach.
This article has pictures and a video of a very cool new large species of squid. It seems to fly through the water with wings, and has cool alien-like arms coming off the rear of it.
Amazing that is has been spotted in four different oceans, but no one has seen it before. It says a lot about how much we do not know about the oceans.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
For example, the formerly plentiful Patagonian and Antarctic Toothfishes (known in the restaurant trade as "Chilean Sea Bass" despite being amazingly ugly deep-sea dwellers) are well on their way to being fished to extinction.
Like many large fish, they have a long reproductive cycle, and thus are easily driven to extinction by modern fishing methods. Not that the fishing industry as a whole isn't fishing pretty much everything to commercial extinction, but they can do it a lot faster to species that take a long time to become reproductive adults.
The Discovery Channel Website doesn't indicate that these will air again anytime in the near future. You will also note that the Discovery Channel's web strategy is severely lacking because there is no way to have them notify you when it is coming on again. Or are they just being obscure because they reap more profits from DVD sales?
But I digress, this series kicks ass. It doesn't focus solely on the deep-sea critters, but rather casts a wide net. If you saw this show and were not completely freaked out by the presence of crazy brine pools at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, you aren't very curious about the world you live on.
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It is conceivable that at times of massive kills at the surface (comet/asteroid strikes, climate change) the flux of food increased rapidly. This would give rise to a brief period of intense growth, coupled with an increase in the diversity in each species. Once the feast is over, there will be a massive die-off (i.e., selection event) as the scavengers, then predators starve.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
More like I was getting high on some pills
Who the hell could catch a "huge" great white shark on a "tiny sport boat?" Those things are massive and incredibly strong, it wouldn't tire so easily, especially one that "must have been almost a ton in weight?"
By any chance did you get this story confused with the time you may have flushed down a very traumatic shit in a scary place while you were high on some great white Guamanian cocaine?
They don't understand the concept of thumbnails.
The pictures are reduced in dimension but not file size, and do not link to the full-size image.
Maybe it's a side effect of the bends, or something.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
You might also like to read the slashdot story.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
The previous poster is hinting at why they kept all three specimens. Let me make it more plain. By the time the fish were found in the net, they were as good as dead, if not dead already.
When fish with swim bladders are brought up from depth (90m is deep enough), this gas-filled bladder expands grossly, giving the fish fatal internal injuries. For example, the bladders of these fish from 90m would swell to about 9 times the volume that they were at depth.
Fish brought up from great depths, even if they lack swim bladders, can die from what is essentially The Bends, i.e. dissolved gas within their tissues fizzing out of solution. (They can die from other things as well.)
Yeah, me too.
But of course, then I remember the possibility that the use of floodlights that far down can also be damaging: any light-sensing organs on any creatures down there are going to be extremely sensitive, and will likely be fried by the amount of light needed to take a picture (with standard equipment).
So yes, a picture of one of these critters swimming/floating in their native habitat would be nicer than seeing them dead on an examination tray. But it's not so nice to know that the picture shows a creature that has just been permanently blinded by the very fact that you are looking at it.
- sigh -
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
So my question is, before I goto google for a bit, does anyone have any links to helpful sources for the preservation of our Oceans?
Yes.
Check out the PEW Oceans Commision's final report, released last month. Everything you want to know, without the spin.
"Scientists, fishermen, conservationists, elected leaders, and business officials unveil recommendations to avert decline of ocean wildlife and collapse of ocean ecosystems"
http://www.pewoceans.org/
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Actually this isn't his inspiration - although he may have drawn from that one too.
The real model was a kind of predatory shrimp.
That shrimp catches jelly-fish empties out everthing it doesn't need and anchores itself in the remainder which it uses to hatch its eggs.