The social science series "The Earth Is Plain" is the blue ocean chapter
18. Rebirth from the Fire (Part 2)
Pre-introduction: The female elephant seal lost 8 kilograms per day, and the weight dropped from 600 to 350 kilograms in 30 days
The world of the stars, the vicissitudes of the sea, and the sperm whale popsicle is undergoing drastic changes. At the age of thirty, he is no longer weak, and after all kinds of tribulations and hardships, this wandering child has become the king of the deep sea. The primal impulses in the growing popsicles grew stronger and stronger, inspiring it to take another risk. Now, the largest herd of sperm whales in the Kaikoura Archipela Islands will head to the northern colony of female whales. The sperm whale popsicle is now going on a blind date, but it doesn't know where it's looking for, and the popsicle never knows the answer except for another female whale. The vast Pacific Ocean is full of opportunities and challenges, with the deepest trench on the blue planet, and popsicles that can practice diving anytime, anywhere to make yourself stronger.
The ocean was once home to all the creatures of the world, and perhaps 80% of them now live in the sea, most of which roam the deep sea where humans cannot survive. The Pacific Ocean is the deepest of the seven oceans on Earth. On the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, the collision of the Pacific Plate with the Philippine Plate is squeezed into the mantle, creating a huge subsidence zone in the mantle layer, forming a huge ocean valley and producing the Mariana Trench at a depth of 11,034 meters, more than 2,000 meters above the elevation of Mount Everest. If a stone is thrown from the surface of the sea, it will take an hour for the stone to fall to the deepest part of the seabed, and that is only eleven kilometers.
Behind the trench, the towering submarine mountains, the submarine volcanoes around the Arc of The Mariana, form the Pacific Ring of Fire. It's a place off the beaten track. Sperm whales travel north along the deep-sea conveyor belt, where popsicles and friends arrive. The deep seabed is a strange world that has never been seen before, and it is also home to many of the world's weirdest animals, with fish shining on the dark seabed. But it's inaccessible, and more people have been to space than to the bottom of the deep sea. The sperm whale popsicle floats up for a breath, the last sip in the next hour or more. It was about to leave the warm, bright waters and dive into the dark, cold depths of the sea. Sunlight only has a direct effect on the upper 100 meters of seawater, photosynthesis can only be carried out here, and coral reefs can only be formed here. Leaving this thin layer of abundant source of life, crossing the edge of the coral reef, we immediately enter another world where survival is not easy; the ocean below 150 meters cannot be photosynthesized, there are no plants, only animals. The animals here tend to feed on sea snow, so they rely on the second-hand energy converted by the sun's energy captured by organisms near the surface of the water.
Moving close to the seabed, popsicles travel to the bottom of the deep sea, to a world completely separate from the rest of the waters. As the sky darkened, the slope at a depth of 300 metres slowed down, and the sperm whale entered the continental slope, which stretched for about two hundred and fifty kilometers from the coast, with a very gentle slope, which had become very dark and the temperature in the water had dropped rapidly. Entering the micro-bright area, it is a strangely dim world where many animals have become completely transparent. In this shimmering world, animals must be able to see clearly and not want to be seen too clearly by their enemies.
(Rib shrimp is also known as skull shrimp.) The picture below is enlarged, two large eyes like a pair of boxing gloves) A huge rib shrimp, that is, a wheat straw worm, twelve centimeters long, almost completely transparent, the head structure looks almost like two large eyes, it is raising its vigilance to see if there is prey; other crustaceans are another monster that lives in the micro-bright area, is the inspiration for many alien movies, and it lives with its growing offspring like a parasite in the stolen jellyfish body. Its amazing set of double scissors and its large eyes make the crustacean a powerful predator; even the higher complex creatures become transparent in the micro-bright area, the squid is the highest invertebrate, but the squid may not go to the surface of the water for a lifetime, so the body does not need to be as strong as other cousins living in shallow waters, it is like a crystal ball that breaks at a touch; in the deep sea lives all kinds of jellyfish that cannot be found elsewhere, thousands of tiny cilia of shining ctenophores, Let them advance in the boundless sea. Hidden in the darkness, they blindly explore where their prey is. The comb jellyfish stretched out a long sticky net to catch passing copepods; the largest web of death was set by the tube jellyfish, and the agitated bell was the head of a group of polyhydran jellyfish, up to forty meters long, and millions of thorny cells floated and sank in the sea.
The dazzling lights in the darkness are all made by fireflies and squid. This invertebrate, which inhabits the western Pacific Ocean a few hundred meters underwater, belongs to the mollusk phylloscope, and is a small member of the large family of squid, growing only to seven or eight centimeters long. The firefly squids that inhabit the middle zone of the ocean can only barely be counted as deep-sea creatures, but they have the characteristics of deep-sea creatures: they can emit light. The distribution, size and structure of cephalopod light emitters vary according to the depth of the vertical distribution of the animal. The main light emitters of the firefly squid grow at the tip of the tentacles, and they use these light and dark flashes of light to attract prey, and then grab the prey with powerful tentacles. Not only that, but the firefly squid can also use its entire body to perform a wonderful "light show", not just tentacles, its body is covered with many tiny light emitters, which can emit light in a coordinated manner, or alternately emit light to form an endless pattern. But such a performance is not to lure the prey, but to convey important information among its companions.
What these glowing creatures have in common is a faint blue and green light. The absorption of light by water increases with the wavelength of light, the wavelength of blue light and green light is short, and it is absorbed less in water, while red light with a longer wavelength is easier to be absorbed, almost a hundred times that of blue light, and it is difficult to reflect, so the red object in the deep sea looks similar to black. But only in the dark deep sea can you truly appreciate their gorgeous and intricate performances. Firefly squids are a typical day-night vertical migratory animal, staying deep in the sea during the day and returning to the shallow ocean at night in search of food, and glowing tentacles can create shadows and provide safety when they swim upstream in the micro-bright area. They usually live at depths of 300 meters, and fishermen cannot catch them. But every spring month, when spawning season comes, millions of firefly squid come to the surface of the water every night and swim close to the shore to lay their eggs. The reason why the firefly squid in Toyama Bay in Japan is so grand and even a World Heritage Site is because Toyama Bay has a V-shaped undersea valley, and the current often flows from bottom to top, pushing a large number of firefly squid to the shallow layer, creating this colorful sea surface. They return to the deep sea before sunrise, leaving their eggs in shallow waters to hatch and grow.
On the bottom of the deep sea, the visit of sperm whales frightens crabs and armored shrimp everywhere, and they rise like a shrimp and crab storm. After the popsicles are gone, they drift back to the bottom of the sea with the sea snow and slowly descend from above. 400 meters below the surface of the sea, a melting lake of sulfur appears. There is a flounder on the surface of the lake, and it does not care about the harsh environment: the hot molten sulfur spring of 200 degrees Celsius seems to have no effect on it, and a thick liquid sulfur gushes out from around it. But even if it is not boiled by melting sulfur, this flounder should be poisoned, right? Actually not. This guy was so brave that he caught what he wanted, a shrimp; a crab also went into melting sulfur, and it was about to be cooked. Poor fellow, can it survive? However, it successfully crossed the Sulphur Lake, and it deserved a medal to become an underwater warrior. But has it escaped flounder hunting? And at the bottom of the sulphur lake, just below the gushing liquid sulphur, the seabed is full of small halibut, swimming around like a flock of butterflies flying on the seabed. No one knows why they are here. Then the clue to the puzzle appears, there is a dead fish on the seabed, which is a middle-class fish, not a flounder. One possible explanation is that the nearby sulfur springs resemble natural traps, where passing fish are poisoned and sink into flounder meals, and flounder itself is immune to this chemical venom. This is a biological miracle. The number of entirely new food chains that survive in this extreme environment is staggering. There are many fish around the hot springs, and they are all new species.
Each volcano on the ocean floor has a different biota, different chemicals and environments, so there are new species and new animal populations everywhere. In the northwestern Lotta Submarine Mountains, at the edge of a huge eruption column, the seabed began to shake, and dark red magma gushed out of the cracks, and gas erupted, and the rocks were pushed out. But there are two species of shrimp in the crater, one of which is a new species, and there are so many that they are indisputable. However, no other creature wants to live here, despite the abundance of food sources. Perhaps attracted by volcanic eruptions, the shrimp decided to follow the sulfur down in a place where other species were afraid to escape for their lives. On top of a rock is a large shrimp, which is lonely waiting in the crater. Therefore, submarine volcanoes are an important part of the marine environment and home to many organisms. Uplifted submarine mountains near the surface of the sea often create a local environment in which nutrient-rich bottom water rises along the slopes, benefiting all living things, from coral reefs to large schools of fish. But scientists still don't know, how did the submarine mountains become coral reefs? (To be continued)
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