Marine organisms that live in the depths are constantly trying to survive: their diet is very meager;
This hostile environment that is at the centerthe attention of a major UN oceans summit in Lisbon this week, forced the inhabitants to develop special coping strategies. Many of these can easily be attributed to alien beings, as they are unique.
Place to live
Until the middle of the 19th century, scientists believed that life was impossible beyond a few hundred meters. People considered the lack of light, the enormous pressure, the cold and the lack of food to be too severe.
At a depth of 200 to 1,000 meters, the light dims,until it completely disappears, and with it the plants; below 2,000 meters, the pressure is 200 times higher than atmospheric pressure. From bottomless plains to cavernous trenches that could easily fit Everest, life has found its place.
On the eve of the Karen Osborne summitfrom the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History gave an interview to Agence France-Presse and noted that when people think about the depths of the sea, it is the bottom that comes to mind. “But all that water between them is full of incredible animals. There’s a ton of life there,” she noted.
These open water dwellers face a serious problem: they have nowhere to hide. “No algae, no caves or mud. Predators attack them from below, from above, from all sides.
Masters of disguise
One tactic is to become invisible. Some creatures are red, so they are difficult to distinguish in an environment where it is no longer perceived. Other inhabitants of the depths were born transparent.
For example, the transparent spider worm Tomopterida, which ranges in size from a few millimeters to a meter in length and which moves through the water, swinging its limbs and glowing.
According to the National Oceanic andUS Atmospheric Research (NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) bioluminescence is especially common among fish, squid and jellyfish. About 80% of animals living at a depth of 200 to 1,000 meters emit light.
This chemical process is useful for protection,reproduction or foraging for food, but no one knows for sure why so many creatures evolved it, NOAA noted. For example, a jellyfish begins to glow when it is attacked by a fish. Jellyfish are small, and the fish that eat them are not very large, but large fish, seeing this signal, swim and eat the predator that was trying to eat the jellyfish, said Candidate of Chemical Sciences I. V. Yampolsky, researcher, Laboratory of Biophotonics, IBCh RAS.
Snow from corpses
Since there are no plants and animals around,Scattered across the vast expanses, they do everything possible to disappear; creatures in the ocean depths often find it difficult to find “living” food. For example, predators may not find fresh food for 3 weeks. There remains another option - to feast on the dead.
Organic particles from surface waters -the decomposed bodies of animals and plants, mixed with feces, drift down in the form of the so-called "sea snow". Such dead confetti is part of the process of carbon dioxide fixation in the depths of the ocean.
This is the salvation for many deep-sea animals,including a blood-red vampire squid that, contrary to its reputation, peacefully picks up sea snow like a vacuum cleaner. When giants like dead whales sink to the seafloor, scavengers quickly turn them into bones.
"Hellish" vents
Since most of the oceans are stillexplored, there is a popular belief that humanity knows more about the surface of Mars than about the seabed of our planet. But, unlike space objects, the unfavorable conditions of the depths do not prevent the development of life from developing. For example, scalding hydrothermal vents in cracks between oceanic plates that spew hydrogen sulfide.
Microorganisms use them to create organic matter through chemosynthesis, just as plants use the sun for photosynthesis. It, in turn, feeds "violent" ecosystems.
The existence of these hydrothermal vents was unknown until the 1970s.
The future is unknown
To date, scientists have identified about 250,000 marine species, although experts suggest there are at least a million more unknown individuals.
People may not have explored much ofsea depths, but have left their mark through global warming, overfishing and pollution. The oceans are acidifying, absorbing more and more CO₂, oxygen-free "dead zones" are growing, and microplastics have been found in crustaceans at a depth of nearly 11,000 meters in the Mariana Trench.
Food reaches the bottom in smaller quantities. How the underwater inhabitants will survive is unknown.
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