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New Record Set For Deepest Dwelling Fish

mpicpp tips news that oceanographers have discovered a creature that sets the record for the most deeply dwelling fish on Earth. It was found in the Mariana Trench, some 8,145 meters below the surface. The 30-day voyage took place from the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel, Falkor, and is the most comprehensive survey of world's deepest place ever undertaken. The Hadal Ecosystem Studies (Hades) team deployed unmanned landers more than 90 times to depths that ranged between 5,000m and 10,600m. They studied both steep walls of the undersea canyon. ... Dr. Jamieson said: "We think it is a snailfish, but it's so weird-looking; it's up in the air in terms of what it is. "It is unbelievably fragile, and when it swims, it looks like it has wet tissue paper floating behind it. And it has a weird snout — it looks like a cartoon dog snout."

33 comments

  1. But but but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    this rock has nothing on it and is very dangerous and there's nothing left to explore we should be spending this money on space elevators to get off this rock and not to explore the oshunz!!! lol

    1. Re:But but but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mods shouldn't rate this as flamebait -- it mocking people who always complain that money would be better spent on things that interest them.

    2. Re:But but but by SourceFrog · · Score: 1

      One of the problems is that the majority of the American public still think the space program sinks a significant portion of the federal budget. Reality is it's less than 0.5% of expenditure - we could cancel every last bit of space-related research and it would hardly even register as a blip in terms of increased money available to spend on anything else.

      --
      My other UID is three digits.
    3. Re:But but but by SourceFrog · · Score: 1

      A few other brief points:

      1. There are NO active projects anywhere to build space elevators. The technology doesn't exist. @GP AC: Nobody is spending your tax money on space elevators, so stop hysterically hyper-ventilating about non-existent straw-men.
      2. In the long run, colonizing other planets and star systems will be the single-most important achievement we'll ever make as a species. Ever. Nothing can top it - it will be the most historical event in human history, bar none. It takes a small mind not to grasp this. Contrast that against the tiny budget we allocate to it, it's actually absurd. We spend more on booze each year.
      3. The idea we should cancel all space programs because "wow, we found a new species of fish at >8000m!" is retarded.
      4. Unlike finding a new type of fish, being a multi-planetery species will help ensure our survival - there are many potential Earth-wide human-extinction events that will eventually statistically occur - not "might occur", but *will occur* - e.g. asteroids have wiped out most life on earth *multiple times* in the planet's history.

      --
      My other UID is three digits.
  2. But, the important news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Is that it is delicious, and even more so due to its rarity.

    1. Re:But, the important news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The chinese are working on traps to supply the virility potion market

  3. Not the deepest dwelling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    These fish still have a ways down to catch yelp.

  4. old news by ihtoit · · Score: 3, Informative

    as in, this was on mainstream two days ago.

    http://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/718... & http://www.abdn.ac.uk/oceanlab... (original research)

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

    and a seriously poor writeup from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    1. Re:old news by oodaloop · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Slashdot, in case you're new here, is a news aggregator. So every article will be somewhere else first. That's how it works. And two days isn't old.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    2. Re:old news by ihtoit · · Score: 0

      I'm far from new, this is my third account.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    3. Re:old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And yet you still dont know how this place works...

    4. Re:old news by ihtoit · · Score: 0

      how do you know what I do and don't know!? GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    5. Re:old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Well there are 3 options...

      1) You don't know how this place works. According to you this is not true.
      2) You don't care but for this to be true you wouldn't have posted.
      3) You're a fucking idiot.

      Logic dictates #3.

    6. Re:old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You kneeling. Me cuming on your face.

    7. Re: old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Never heard of Bennett?

    8. Re: old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Somebody needs a bro hug.

      No homo.

    9. Re:old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot, in case you're new here, is a news aggregator. So every article will be somewhere else first. That's how it works. And two days isn't old.

      Interestingly, one of the reasons CmdrTaco used to give for not checking for blatant errors or duplicate stories was because he was afraid that it would take too long to post stories.

      Not sure what the excuse is now, of course...

  5. Do they float? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think one way to fish is to drop a grenade or TNT stick into a body of water. Then, at least some of the fish float to the surface.

    Is it realistic to think we could explore life in the depths of the ocean by dropping depth charges and waiting to see what comes up?

    1. Re:Do they float? by scotts13 · · Score: 1

      I think one way to fish is to drop a grenade or TNT stick into a body of water. Then, at least some of the fish float to the surface.

      Is it realistic to think we could explore life in the depths of the ocean by dropping depth charges and waiting to see what comes up?

      In the same way we could learn about the culture of foreign countries by nuking them and examining the radiated spectrum. The search for knowlege only occasionally involves explosives.

  6. Depth Limit for Fish by Capt.Albatross · · Score: 5, Informative

    A recent article in New Scientist (paywalled, I don't have an alternative) suggests that 8 km is about the limit for fish. The problem, apparently, is that the pressure distorts protein shapes, eventually preventing them from working properly. The tissue (particularly muscle) of deep-sea fishes contains trimethylamine oxide, which may protect against this problem, and the deeper you go, the more of it the fish have, but by about 8km they are saturated with it.

    Invertebrates have been found deeper, so presumably they have a different mechanism.

           

    1. Re:Depth Limit for Fish by colinb8 · · Score: 2

      Yes - I'm looking at the article in the print edition of New Scientist 6.December.2014. Tracking a scientist quoted in the article leads to this Scientific Americam blog - snailfish surprise in the kermadec Trench:

      Partway into the collection of one-minute video clips, however, a snailfish could be seen doing something it had never been seen to do before: swim up. In an instant, the conception of the snailfish as a purely benthic species was rewritten. This is puzzling because theoretically fish shouldn’t be able to survive deeper than about 8,500 meters , and if they can swim up in the water column they might just decide to migrate deeper at some point to take advantage of the food and habitat down there. But at some point beyond that depth the difference in osmotic pressure between fish cells and seawater flips, meaning that the cellular physiology in fish would have to change in order to expel water rather than keep it in. Some marine fish can do this (think of salmon returning from the ocean to spawn), but they take time for their physiology to reboot and they have evolved the mechanism to do so.

    2. Re:Depth Limit for Fish by The+Raven · · Score: 1

      I suspect that as life goes deeper there are two strategies:

      • Coping mechanisms, where things such as trimethylamine oxide are used to allow biological processes evolved at shallower environments to function. This is probably more common, simply due to the disparity in the quantity of life (and thus genes) in shallow vs deep water.
      • New biology, where completely different proteins are used, ones that simply would not work at lower pressure. We won't find these until we sequence deep sea creatures and do simulations to see what proteins are encoded, and why they work at high depths. This is hard work, and will keep biologists in work for decades.
      --
      "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
  7. How is this new? by FuegoFuerte · · Score: 0

    "it's so weird-looking; it's up in the air in terms of what it is. It is unbelievably fragile, and... it looks like it has wet tissue paper floating behind it. And it has a weird snout — it looks like a cartoon dog snout."

    Sounds an awful lot like someone I saw walking out of the women's restroom at WalMart once.

  8. Sushi? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How long before the Japanese hunt down that fish and serve it as sushi?

  9. Did they discovery the important information? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That is, does it taste better with lemon or garlic?

  10. 12,125 PSI pressure at that depth by Beeftopia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    12,125 PSI pressure at that depth. Surface pressure is 14.7 PSI.

    1) Source for ocean depth pressure at 8145m.
    2) Source for atmospheric pressure at earth's surface

    It's totally dark down there. No light except the occasional bioluminescence. It's like an off-world environment. Makes me wonder where else life can exist.

    1. Re: 12,125 PSI pressure at that depth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, we know that there are spermatozoa living in the deep and dark crevices of your anus..

    2. Re:12,125 PSI pressure at that depth by PPH · · Score: 2

      I still want to know what's behind the door

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    3. Re:12,125 PSI pressure at that depth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's like an off-world environment. Makes me wonder where else life can exist.

      That's nothing. You'd be surprised how many places that seem incredibly inhospitable to life actually have something living there. Texas, for instance.

  11. Molten Sulphur fish. by bejiitas_wrath · · Score: 1

    There are fish that can survive swimming on molten sulphur. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci...

    Beat that.

    --
    liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
  12. space, deep sea, money and allocations by billdale · · Score: 1

    As already stated, we spend trifles on space. We spend even less on these undersea adventures that all but Tea Party psychos feel enriched by, if for no other reason than because we find new and unique life forms that give us keys to untangling cancers, aging, and diseases of every kind. What we DON'T need is a back-breaking military budget when there are alternatives, such as flooding the Internet with countermeasures against the very successful lures al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIL and other malevolent jackasses use to suck in vulnerable nitwits that become suicide bombers, rapists and child killers. No one has yet begun to tell them: "what if they're wrong, and Allah does not gift you with dozens of virgins and pleasures for eternity? What if what they say does not agree with the Koran by any means? Are you willing to burn in eternal hell for the terrible, evil things they want you to do?" There are countless such things we can be telling them, assaulting their faulty logic, hammering home the illegitimacy of their doings. "Who are the real good guys, and bad guys? Who went to Malaysia after the tsunamis, and brought food and medicine to the millions of Muslims that were starving and bleeding? How much effort has the Taliban made to build hospitals and schools, rather than destroy them?" If we start driving electric vehicles rather than spending $450B a year on oil we buy from despotic OPEC countries, that's hundreds of billions of dollars we have to spend on hospitals, schools, roads, bridges... and SPACE. We can also encourage the super-wealthy among us to play higher, more challenging games as Musk, Gates, and others have done, such as using their resources to produce inexpensive medications and verify herbal remedies, if Eli Lilly, Pfizer and others are only interested in profit? -- Electric Bill

  13. another thought by billdale · · Score: 1

    We try to think outside the box-- biological systems surviving at enormous depths, extreme temperatures, feeding on arsenic and old lace-- but what if life is even more extreme than our wildest imaginings: life forms whose atoms are stripped of electrons, nothing more than ionic creatures, surviving within suns, or deep within gaseous bodies such as Saturn, Jupiter... or even within black holes? We could never know what is in such places, it would seem.