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."

But but but

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:

[SourceFrog]

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.

Re:

[SourceFrog]

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

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

old news

[ihtoit]

as in, this was on mainstream two days ago.

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

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

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

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[ihtoit]

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

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[Anonymous Coward]

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

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[ihtoit]

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

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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[scotts13]

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.

Depth Limit for Fish

[Capt.Albatross]

A recent article in New Scientist [newscientist.com] (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:

[Colin Bartlett]

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 [scientificamerican.com]:

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

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[The Raven]

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 sim

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. [wolframalpha.com]
2) Source for atmospheric pressure at earth's surface [stanford.edu]

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:

[PPH]

I still want to know what's behind the door [xkcd.com]

Molten Sulphur fish.

[bejiitas_wrath]

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

Beat that.

space, deep sea, money and allocations

[billdale]

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 jack

another thought

[billdale]

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.