Giant life in the deep sea refers to the phenomenon that many invertebrates or other organisms inhabit the deep sea are usually larger than those of the same species that inhabit shallow waters.
Typical examples are
Gan's giant crab
The Gan's giant cetacean crab is the only extant species in the genus Macrocephalus in the family Macrocephalus known to be the largest crustacean in the world and in the family Dchizocephalus subspine of the order Dipteropoda. The body is dark orange , with ten long limbs , with white spots on it , and the front two limbs develop into claws. The largest specimen had a leg extension of 4.2 meters, a body length of 38 centimeters and a weight of 20 kilograms.
It lives in the silt terrain of the Pacific Ocean at a depth of 500-1,000 meters beyond Iwate Prefecture in Japan and the northeast corner of Taiwan. It feeds on sharks, hagfish, crabs, and various fish.
Royal striped fish
It is found in the deep, Indian and Pacific Oceans, in the subtropical deep seas from 72 degrees north latitude to 52 degrees south latitude. It is the longest bony fish in the world, with a body length of up to 11 meters, but generally about 3 meters. The maximum known weight can reach 272 kg. The body of the fish is silvery gray with blue-black markings. The head is blue and the fins are red.
Deep water tail
Deep water tail, also known as Dashi close, Dashi deep water tail, is 2.7 meters long, about 1.5 meters wide, and weighs about 120 kg. Deepwater tails are widely distributed in the Indo-Pacific region, inhabit depths of 270-680 m, and feed on crustaceans, cephalopods and fish.
Seven-armed octopus
The seven-armed octopus is a huge octopus, estimated to be 4 meters long and weigh 75 kilograms. The type specimen of the seven-arm octopus was found in the Atlantic Ocean, and in 2002 in New Zealand, a fishing boat trawled a seven-arm octopus. This is the first time they have been found in the South Pacific. Its outer membrane sleeve is 0.69 meters long, 2.9 meters long and weighs 61 kilograms.
Giant squid
Giant squid, also known as the king squid, is a kind of squid that lives in the deep seas of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and its maximum size has been confirmed to be 14 meters, but some people still think that there may be a larger giant squid in the deep sea, and its length should be greater than 18 meters or even longer.
King sour squid
The King Squid, also known as the Antarctic King Squid or Giant Gun Squid, can only estimate its maximum size from the carcasses found in the stomachs of its natural enemies, sperm whales, due to the small number of biological samples, which are about 6-8 meters long and may weigh up to 750 kg. However, according to the calculation of juvenile individuals, the adult weight should have exceeded the giant squid, making it the heaviest known invertebrate, but it is still not as long as the giant squid, and it and the giant squid are the largest invertebrates in the first world.
However , organisms found in some of the deep-sea areas ( such as the small-headed sleeping shark and the Pacific sleeping shark ) are not considered to be concrete examples of deep-sea phenomena , as these organisms sometimes move to shallow waters and are not necessarily larger in size than their shallow water relatives.
The small-headed sleeping shark, also known as the Greenland shark, the Atlantic sleeping shark, and the grey shark, is a large shark that is about 6-7 meters long and lives in the North Atlantic ocean around Greenland and Iceland.
The Pacific Sleeping Shark, which inhabits continental sheds and water temperatures between 70 degrees north latitude and 47 degrees south latitude, can reach up to 2,000 meters on the seabed. It can be up to 7 meters long.
Scientists have not been able to clarify the specific causes of the phenomenon that causes the huge phenomenon in the deep sea, so there are many theoretical explanations for this phenomenon, such as the scarcity of food resources (which causes the deep-sea organisms to mature late, which in turn leads to larger size), and the huge pressure under the deep sea, but it may also be caused by other reasons.
In the case of crustacean subphylum, scientists believe that the reason for the increase in body size is the same as the increase in animal size with latitude in Bergman's law: the expansion of both bodies is accompanied by a decrease in ambient temperature.
This variation in body size with depth has been observed in types of organisms such as Krill, Decapods, Isopods, and Endopospids, and the phenomenon of increasing body size with rising latitude has been verified in the same type of biota.
Such as: the great king has apod, also known as the giant isopod, giant deep-sea lice, living in the deep sea of 360-730 meters. They are the world's largest arthropod phylum and other popods, with a body length of 19-37 cm. In fact, people should be familiar with animals of this size, such as the land cousin of the king's foot, the tide worm, which can often be seen in life.
Decreasing temperature is thought to increase cell volume and at the same time increase lifespan, both of which can lead to extreme macrosomia of biological body size (e.g., crustaceans grow throughout their lives and may therefore result in huge body size). In the Arctic and Antarctic waters, the gradient of vertical temperature decreases, but the trend of increasing the body size due to depth is relatively insignificant, which is a strong argument that the decline in temperature will lead to an increase in body size, and hydrostatics may be an important factor that really leads to body shape changes.
Temperature variation appears to have had less effect on changes in the volume of giant tubeworms. Giant tubeworms mainly inhabit deep-sea hot springs, and their ambient temperature is about 2 to 30 °C, while their body length can reach 2.7 meters. This is similar to the size of the tube worm (lamellibrachia luymesi) that inhabits the cold springs on the ocean floor. However, the former has a faster growth rate and a shorter lifespan of 2 years, while the latter grows quite slowly and can live up to 250 years.
The genus Plume Worm, also known as tubular worms and flap-whiskered brachiopods, is a close relative of giant tubeworms that inhabit cold springs on the deep seabed where hydrocarbons (oil seedlings or methane) seep out. They rely entirely on symbiotic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in the body to provide nutrients.
The heme of the featherweed can carry hydrogen sulfide and oxygen absorbed from the surrounding environment and supply these chemicals to symbiotic bacteria in the body. Unlike tubeworms, which inhabit hot springs on the ocean floor, plumeria draw hydrogen sulfide from sediments around cold springs through root-like external tissues, through which they can also excrete sulfates back into the sediments.
The most famous known habitat for featherweeds is cold springs at depths of 500 to 800 meters in the Gulf of Mexico. Native featherweed species (l. luymesi) can be more than 3 meters long and grows very slowly, with each individual over 250 years old. Numerous featherweeds are organized into unique ecosystems, and hundreds of species of animals depend on them for survival, and some species can only be found here.
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