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."

Comments

old news

[ihtoit]

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/...

Re:old news

[oodaloop]

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.

Depth Limit for Fish

[Capt.Albatross]

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.

       

Re:Depth Limit for Fish

[colinb8]

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.

12,125 PSI pressure at that depth

[Beeftopia]

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.

Re:12,125 PSI pressure at that depth

[PPH]

I still want to know what's behind the door