arthurhia:

autisming:

sugimoto-reimi:

sugimoto-reimi:

when u think about his soulful brown eyes…

him

[ID: a photo of a glaborous fan lobster; a type of slipper lobster that is off white with many red dots, giving its body a pink hue. it has circular brown eyes. end ID]

i’m so glad this post is reaching the marine animals enthusiasts and i’m getting tags adoring this little guy bc i had to sit through a LOT of “ewwww i hate this!!!” for so many years…. thank you for loving him

tiktoks-for-tired-tots:

itistimetodisappear:

bogleech:

itistimetodisappear:

onelonesheep:

itistimetodisappear:

It’s incredible how much all deep sea creatures are just little guys. They’re only scary because you can’t see them. But if you could they would just be moseying

Oh he’s moseying alright

Only when they have to!! This tripod fish evolved to stand in place in the current and just let food drift into their face. Because they might never even meet another tripod fish they also evolved to have both kinds of reproductive organs and self fertilize when they feel like it.

Ok this specific guy is chillin

bettalbimarginata:

bogleech:

I just don’t get it. How can our society act so goddamned normal about seahorses. How can anybody so casually accept that that’s a fish???

This is one of nature’s most anatomically perverse of all beasts. A FISH, like a carp or a bass or a beta is a fish, but it bent its body straight up only to bend its head permanently back down. It stretched its skull into a pipe. It tapered its tail like a lizard, specifically like a chameleon. It can also move its eyes independently by the way, you know, like a chameleon. Fun fact, it can change color to express its mood, like you know whatever does that. It doesn’t properly swim anymore. It buzzes its few remaining fins like an insect’s wings to float itself around at a snail’s pace. It lives its whole life clinging to coral branches or seaweed, which means it decided to become a “tree dweller” in an environment where gravity didn’t even matter anyway. The males get pregnant. They make noises at each other by rubbing some of their neck bones together. Every day, EVERY DAY a mated pair does a little dance and a little neck bone song so they remember which two seahorses they were. They’re a beautiful precious obscenity. Nothing so adorable ever made such a strong case against a logical creator.

They have as little skin and meat as they could get away with. Their skeleton is almost all they are.

This thing is one of the most successful hunters on the planet. Because their mouth is fused shut, except for the tip, they can create a powerful suction force in front of that one little opening in order to draw in prey. 

Lions have a 20-30% success rate on their hunts, depending on daytime and if they’re in a group. Great white sharks, anywhere from 40% to 80%, depending on the size and skill of the individual. Dragonflies, which are one of the most successful terrestrial hunters, can hit about 80-85%. Seahorses? 90% success rate, sometimes more. Only a fraction of their prey escapes that powerful vacuum. They’re incredibly precise. 

If you touch them, they feel hard, because of the skeleton underneath their skin. Their tails are being studied to make coiling bridges, because of how strong that interlocked structure is. Different species range in size from over a foot long, to barely an inch. 

Behold: not just a fish, but a wildly successful predator! 

grison-in-space:

bogleech:

hirosensei:

apodemusalba:

bogleech:

byasuga:

bogleech:

sabertoothwalrus:

sabertoothwalrus:

sometimes I think about how red is the first color in the visible light spectrum to be absorbed in ocean water

and how many deep-sea creatures evolved to be red as a stealth adaptation, making them near invisible when there’s little to no light present

and it makes me think. If there’s never any visible light present in these animals’ lifetimes, if no ROV shines a little flashlight in depths that would otherwise not have light, would these animals ever get the opportunity to actually be red? that might be a stupid question.

imagine being a little deep sea creature and having no idea you’re red until something comes along and shines a light on you except you still wouldn’t be able to tell because you’re probably colorblind. anyway. I don’t know where I was going with this post

Is color relative? Or inherent? Or both???

Like is color physiological and determined by the shape of whatever pigment cells that will always absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others?

or is color meaningless if there’s no light to absorb and reflect?

Is it completely relative because the way we percieve color is subjective, how even within our own species there are so many different kinds of ways people can observe color?

makes you think

Red light doesn’t make it to the deep ocean from the sun, but that doesn’t mean red light doesn’t exist at that depth!

The stomiidae, which include the viperfish, dragonfish, and loosejaws, are one example of a deep sea animal that evolved to perceive and produce red light because it isn’t naturally present in their environment and most other organisms never hit on that adaptation. In most of this group, tiny red lights can be switched on and off throughout their skin to communicate with their own kind in secret.

More threateningly, some of them have high-powered “floodlights” of pure red just beneath their eyes; almost no other deep sea fish emit actual BEAMS of light to illuminate what they’re looking at because that’d make them a shining beacon to every larger predator in the area, but since it’s red, the only risk ends up coming from their fellow red-light hunters and those remain just uncommon enough to be worth the chance.

In many members of this group, most of all the loosejaws (hence the name), almost the entire skull can naturally detach from the rest of the body on specialized stalks at lightning speed so that their long, hooked jaws can grab prey in an instant, almost the same exact motion as the arm of a preying mantis:

If you were a little fish in this scenario you would see absolutely nothing but darkness around you and possibly feel pretty safe, because maybe you’ve evolved to blend in perfectly with the surrounding void and you can’t see any blue or yellow or green lights coming to get you. You have no idea that there’s been a spotlight right on you all along until its owner’s face flies off to impale you and shove you whole into its giant throat all in less than half of a second :)

someone explain why deep sea creatures are so fucking scary like is there a logical reason was god like hey that’s deep and dark so I shall create absolutely terrifying creatures who will haunt humans in their dreams

Think about the predators up here on land; bigger eyes, longer teeth and bigger mouths. We know these things indicate something that can harm us, or stalk us in the dark.

Now you multiply that the farther you go down the ocean.

If it’s darker, then they need bigger eyes. If it’s a LOT darker, then their eyes need more and more specialized anatomy nothing could ever possibly need up here in the sun, so by necessity they do not have the kind of eyes we know:

And food is so far between, the predators need even longer teeth, to make sure those rare meals they encounter really can’t escape:

And because it’s dark AND food is scarce, they need big, expandable jaws and bodies that are almost all stomach, to guarantee they can take advantage of more meals and don’t have too much more body to have to nourish:

effervescent c:

How are these even real????

Most of these look pretty reasonable imo but I’ve never heard of the loosejaw before and I gotta say, it looks like it has a puppet for a head, which is quite unsettling and seems like it shouldn’t be practical. Also, is that a second mouth behind its skull? Or does it have to reattach its head to swallow, and it’s just coincidence that the biomechanical structures behind its skull look like a mouth?

I’m glad people asked!!!

The loosejaw does have extra teeth back there to help keep prey from escaping, and the head structure all folds back together:

The most surprising thing about these features, however, is that they’re already present in many of the fish people are familiar with! The loosejaw pushes it to an extreme, but you can see how these freshwater carp also “unfurl” and “throw” their jaw structure:

The loosejaw just doesn’t have a skin covering this structure, because that allows it to fling the jaw even faster through the water with no resistance!

…And it’s also quite normal for all kinds of everyday fish to have additional teeth or a functional secondary set of jaws in the back of the throat:

Man, I had never stopped to think about how wild it is that red light at the depths of deep sea fishes is just as weird and wild as the way that weakly electric fishes use mild electric pulses to both sense their environments and talk to one another. Holy fuck it’s another sensory modality that is simultaneously both active and passive at the same time, but we don’t think about bioluminescence like that most of the time in, say, fireflies because we are used to having so much passive radiation that you don’t need the active component of the modality to use the sense. AMAZING.

acti-veg:

‘When fishing stops, the results are remarkable. On average, in 124 marine reserves studied around the world, some of which have been existence only a few years, the total weight of animals and plants has quadrupled since they were established. The size of the animals inhabiting them has also increased, and so has their diversity.

In most cases the shift is visible within two to five years. As the slower-growing species also begin to recover, as sedentary life forms grow back and as reefs of coral and shellfish re-establish themselves - restoring the structural diversity of the seabed - the mass and wealth of the ecosystem is likely to keep rising for a long time.

Five years after Georges Bank, off that coast of New England, was closed for commercial fishing, the number of scallops had risen fourteenfold. Around Lundy Island, mature lobsters trebled in number within eighteen months of the creation of the reserve. After four years they were five times as abundant as those outside, after five years, six times.

Eighteen years after they were first protected, the combined weight of large predatory fish in the Alp Island reserve in the Philippines had risen by a factor of seventeen. Bigger fish produce more eggs, and the quality of eggs improves as the parents mature, so more of the offspring are likely to survive.

Like the Kraken in Tennyson’s poem, the suppressed life of the sea awaits only for its chance to re-emerge.’

George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding The Land, Sea and Human Life

montereybayaquarium:

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#PiDay is for DISCovering the circular critters that run laps around all the others! Our love for them is simply irrational, and we hope you think they’re rad too. Cosined, your Aquarium fronds.

rivendellrose:

illbewithhimlikeishouldbe:

the-peculiar-bi-tch:

urbanfantasyinspiration:

luidilovins:

somecutething:

Dolphins doing cartwheels with an aquarium guest.

(via Ant.Giovanni)

I’m loving this new trend of people going to zoos and participating in animal enrichment. We use to observe large exotic animals for our entertainment, but the fact is that we are now trying to make ourselves equally as entertaining for them. It’s interactive, completely parpicipatory and I would argue that eventually someone’s gonna come up with something new enough that it expland ethologists understanding about how some animals think, problem solve, communicate and feel and I think its fantastic.

Human: play?

Aquatic creature from an entirely different branch of the animal tree: play!

Shit I’m gonna start crying that was so beautiful

Reminds me of when I was very little. I barely remember it but my parents and godparents have told me about it many times. I think it was SeaWorld but it could’ve been somewhere else. I was like two. And we went to go see the dolphins. Well my mom held me up so I could see them properly. One of the dolphins saw my mom holding me up and thought my mom was showing them her baby. So the dolphin swam off then came back with her baby to show my parents. After a few minutes my mom set me down and I started running back and forth and the dolphins swam alongside the glass with me. So they showed off their baby to us and then played with me afterwards.

When I was in elementary school my class did an overnight trip to the local aquarium, and we got to see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. On one part of the tour there was a juvenile giant pacific octopus in a cylinder tank. My dad went up to look at it… and when he would move, it would follow him. They went round in circles together, then he’d stop and go the opposite way and the octopus would follow. It was fabulous.