• MisanthropiCynic@lemm.eeEnglish
    181·
    7 days ago

    Whales suffocate to death; they don’t drown.

    Human breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. We have to hold our breath on purpose to stop ourselves from automatically breathing. This makes us passive breathers. Whales, however, are active breathers. They must choose to inhale which is why they can sleep without sucking in air. When they get too old, sick, or weak to surface, they suffocate.

    Bonus fact: whales can’t breathe through their mouths; it goes straight to the stomach. The blowhole is the only respiratory tract.

    Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.

    • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.

      I’m sure their throat can be blocked that way; but if they can’t breathe through their mouth anyway, is it actually choking? Or just terminally blocked?

      • MisanthropiCynic@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        Fair point. I didn’t even consider the ramifications of wording it like that instead of just saying it has a small throat. I tend to use analogies a lot

        • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          Nah, it makes sense, and ice heard this phrasing before - just always wondered if they meant the poor whale couldn’t breathe, or basically just had indigestion!

  • Homefry@infosec.pubEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    The Blue Whale is so large, that if you laid one out on a standard NBA basketball court, the game would be postponed.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    932·
    8 days ago

    When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean, entire ecosystems rapidly develop around eating every part of it due to how scarce resources are in the deep ocean. This phenomenon is called a “whale fall” and it’s a major source of energy for deep ocean ecosystems.

    • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      7 days ago

      Sometimes I wonder if a shipping container full of billionaires would have a similar effect.

      • Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        7 days ago

        That seems like a waste of a perfectly good shipping container.

        Why don’t we just use environmentally friendly hemp ropes and locally sourced boulders?

        • Adalast@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          7 days ago

          Locally sourcing boulders over the Marianas Trench is going to be such a pain. I’m pretty sure the environmental benefits will outweigh importing some nice basalt from Hawaii before we leave out.

  • Baguette@lemm.eeEnglish
    822·
    8 days ago

    There are lakes in the ocean called brine lakes/pools. Brine is essentially concentrated saltwater; its high salinity means it’s denser than water. On rare occasions, brine doesn’t mix enough with the existing saltwater around it, sinking to the bottom of the ocean and forming these lakes. The lake itself is usually devoid of life; brine itself is so salty that animals go into toxic shock if exposed for too long. However, the edges usually are full of life, where usually things like mussels and other extremophile organisms thrive.

    Side note, subnautica’s lost river is based off of this. No big leviathans in real life though, at least none observed yet…

    Video for fun: https://youtu.be/ZwuVpNYrKPY

    • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Wow, I had no idea these were a thing… and it’s so funky how the surface of the brine pool interacts with the surrounding seawater!

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20·
        8 days ago

        It was never stated but I always assumed the “goo” referred to industrial waste. But SpongeBob creator Steve Hillenburg was an actual marine biologist and would have been well aware of brine pools, so that’s probably right.

        • Baguette@lemm.eeEnglish
          8·
          7 days ago

          Brine can be from industrial waste

          Technically, brine just means a high concentration of salt in a fluid. It doesn’t necessarily have to be sodium chloride like we know, it can be other salts, like calcium chloride. Though the most common case for industrial brine is just desalination plants, other industries can still create brine, like mining/oil drilling. It also depends on how it’s released. Large amounts dumped at once is the reason for manmade brine pools.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    643·
    8 days ago

    Greenland sharks are pretty amazing

    They can grow up to 24 feet putting them at the same giant scale as great whites and basking sharks, but most are usually closer to 5 meters long

    They can live for hundreds of years due to extremely slow metabolism and ambush feeding, some individuals found around 400 years old are as old as the Jamestown colony, Don Quixote, and the discovery of logarithms.

    They are opportunistic feeders and have been found with polar bear and reindeer in their digestive systems, and can pull/vacuum in water to catch their primary prey of fish, eels, and other sharks.

    • MeatPilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      8 days ago

      Back to the horrors of the deep…

      They also commonly have eye parasites that severely impairs their vision or blinds them called Ommatokoita elongata.

      So they get to live long with multiple generations of parasites stuck in their eyes they can’t get out.

    • Artyom@lemm.eeEnglish
      15·
      8 days ago

      Be me

      young shark, ready to make my mark on the world

      Find a book falling from the sky called Don Quixote

      eh_mid.jpg

      Ignore humans for a few hundred years, eat some fish instead

      Find out it’s become a core component of their identity and everyone knows about it

      Even had a ballet about it

      wtf

      • lagoon8622@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        7 days ago

        Don Quixote is actually an awesome book, you should definitely read or listen to it. Give it a bit to get rolling, and you will absolutely be doubled over with laughter

    • notabot@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      7 days ago

      So 5 meter long sharks with 24 feet? That sounds terrifying. How far up the beach can they run?

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      Are they the ones where you have to ferment the flesh or it is toxic? Or wasn’t that a shark?

  • Thorry84@feddit.nlEnglish
    572·
    8 days ago

    While this is funny and all, this isn’t really true for a couple of reasons:

    • We know a hell of a lot about the oceans, we’ve studied them for hundreds years. There has been extensive mapping of the seafloor. All of the areas close to land have been thoroughly studied. And where we’ve spotted interesting stuff, we’ve investigated for sure.
    • We haven’t thoroughly explored the moon. Sure we’ve had nice pictures for a long time. But we’ve only recently seen the rear side of the moon, as we more or less always see the same side from Earth. Not till recent orbiters we’ve had a high resolution map of the moon, comparable to maps we have of the oceans.
    • Only a dozen or so people have ever been to the moon and the amount of research they did was very low. They also haven’t brought back many samples. And the amount we can do from orbit and with rovers is very limited. At this point I would say we know more about Mars than we do about the moon, depending on how to count. The moon isn’t that interesting, so we haven’t done much with it. It’s made of the same stuff as the Earth and without an atmosphere and biosphere, it’s kinda dull.
    • This is basically impossible to measure. What is knowledge? How is it quantified? We could say it’s relative. But since there isn’t a way to know how much total knowledge there is available to learn, I’d say that’s not possible. What does it mean to “explore”? Do people need to go there? Because a hell of a lot of people have been to the seafloor than to the moon. Hell going to the seafloor is a basic tourist activity these days. I’ve been to the Maldives and did some crazy dives looking at life on the bottom of the sea.
    • People might argue the Moon is basically all the same, so once you’ve seen one spot you’ve seen them all. I’d argue that’s not true, we’ve only recently learned the moon’s poles are very interesting and we know very little about that. And I’d counter that argument with the fact the same goes for the deep oceans. A whole lot of it is just barren wasteland, an under water desert. We haven’t explored because there is nothing to see. We select interesting locations and study them thoroughly, instead of studying a lot of it a little bit and wasting huge amounts of time.
    • Another argument often repeated is new species are discovered every day in the ocean. Whilst this is true, we are also destroying a lot of species, so the total number might actually go down instead of up. And a lot of species are variants of already known species. Only expert biologists can differentiate between the species and know what to look for. And I’d argue they don’t change the big picture or understanding at all. Still interesting, but not an indication there is so much more to find out there.
    • But what about something huge living down there? Like a Kraken or dinosaurs? Well no, we don’t have to have studied every square inch to know about big life. Big life is messy, requires a lot of resources and is part of a food chain. You don’t need to see the dinosaur if you can see their giant mountain of crap amidst broken trees. There might be some kind of large squid or something down there, but they will probably be extremely similar to other large squid we already know about. So a new species, but not changing the overall picture. If there were any big monsters down there, we would know about them by now.

    So this is one of those things that might feel true, but in reality it really isn’t.

    • Uli@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      22·
      8 days ago

      Well, now that we know what’s out there, I think we should focus our efforts on putting a big sea monster into the ocean.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      7 days ago

      The moon isn’t that interesting, so we haven’t done much with it.

      It’s a ball full of sharp and toxic shards that get everywhere.

      On the other hand, the ocean has immortal jellyfish and snail with iron armor.

    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      8 days ago

      It might be more accurate to say the average person knows more about what we don’t know about the ocean than what we don’t know about the moon.

      We have a decent idea about what can and may exist in and about Earth’s oceans, but less about the moon; and most people assume it’s just a dusty rock too.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      8 days ago

      Everything outside of my immediate experience is densely packed squid atlanteans. (I feel like some people seem to genuinely think like this, which is distressing)

    • Taiatari@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      The blue planet 1 BBC documentary states that we know about the moons surface than ocean floor. The BBC’s Blue Planet 2 changed that to: we know more about the surface of mars than we know about the ocean floor.

      So make of that what you want.

    • dogs0n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      202·
      8 days ago

      fun fact: animals, exluding humans, kill about 1 MILLION of us humans a year, most of which are not sea animals.

      • barf@vegantheoryclub.orgEnglish
        223·
        8 days ago

        Wow that’s 0.0000003% as much, which is conveniently exactly the same ratio as my balls to your mom.

        • o1011o@lemmy.worldEnglish
          161·
          8 days ago

          It’s also accounted for almost 100% by mosquitos, specifically the diseases they carry…so not really the mosquitos at all. Quick searching shows snakes following mosquitos with 100,000 deaths caused per year. In any case, the scale is prodigiously unbalanced. Human animals kill trillions of non-human animals, almost entirely for their own pleasure. Non-human animals kill a few hundred thousand human animals (or a bit over a million if you count mosquito-borne disease) in self defense or by accident.

        • Lyrl@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          6 days ago

          I guess people eating a basket of shrimp are balanced out by people sharing one cow with several hundred others.

      • BussyCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        Isn’t like more than half that number diseases like malaria spread through mosquitoes

          • NewSocialWhoDis@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            6 days ago

            Does “bugs” have a scientific meaning? I was assuming it was a layman’s term that I could abuse.

            • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 days ago

              An “insect” or “bug” is an arthropod with six legs in the class Insecta. There’s also “true bugs” which are in the order Hemiptera (or even just the suborder Heteroptera if you are super nitpicky) - this includes things like leafhoppers, aphids, assassin bugs…

              Within Insecta, we have Hemiptera, Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps), Coleoptera (beetles), Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths) and Odanata (dragonflies, damselflies).

              To get to crabs, lobsters, and shrimp, you have to zoom out to jointed exoskeletons - Arthropods. (And I think crabs are a clusterfuck that make cladists cry, I’m in a landlocked state and haven’t got to do much ocean science myself so won’t put my foot in my mouth there.)

              Other things that are “not bugs” but often called such - spiders, scorpions, whip scorpions and vinegaroons are all Arachnids (arthropods with specialized limbs called chalicerae - those cool things at the front of a spiders mouth), Rollie pollies/pill bugs are Isopods. Centipedes and millipedes are Myriapods.

              Your larger point about how it’s weird that people get grossed out by the idea of eating mealworms but are okay with chowing down on shrimp is a good one though.

          • NewSocialWhoDis@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            6 days ago

            Not sure what your definition of people is, but Mexicans, Ugandan, and Koreans all eat grasshoppers (and probably others). I know crickets are eaten in Southeast Asia.

            Ants seem too tiny to try to eat, but a Google search reveals they are eaten in South America and Southeast Asia.

  • SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.worldEnglish
    422·
    8 days ago

    Not a fact but a question:

    How do whales keep water out of their anuses when they are deep diving?

    Whales have been known to dive almost 2 miles deep and at that depth you’re looking at almost 300 atmospheres of pressure and a whale’s sphincter has to be strong enough to resist that.

  • tino@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    7 days ago

    Norwegian fjords are freaking deep. When you’re on the shore of Sognefjord, you’re standing in front of a 1300m deep canyon filled with ocean water.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      What I like to think about is that fjords were carved out by glaciers and the sea level has certainly been lower that it was now in the past… but 1300m deep what???

      …so how did Glaciers cut rock BELOW sea level? Like wayyyyyy below sea level?

      It is the weight of the entire glacier bearing down and carving wayyyyyy below a depth that a chunk of ice would make sense being at, the entire glacier basically serves as a trench digging machine and as you pointed out these fjords are REALLY deep.