In 2013 a german fisherman was fishing with three friends in norwegian waters when he hooked what he thought was a submarine and you can see why the fish struggled for an hour and a half before it surfaced when the fishermen saw what hooked and how big it was they had to tie the rope around its tail and tow it to shore because the fish was simply too big for the boat on shore the fish was examined and weighed with a crane turned out to be an atlantic halibut with a I weigh 515 pounds, what’s the problem? You may be wondering if this accidentally caught Atlantic halibut by some guy from Germany will help us unlock the secrets the oceans have held for millions of years.
Today you will learn why the ocean is inhabited by gigantic creatures. fish is considered a bad omen in japan why animals hate the earth that can fool evolution and many other interesting things come on if there is one thing the ocean is particularly good at is creating gigantic animals the human fishermen i mentioned at the they first caught one of those, the atlantic halibut is the largest flatfish in the world and that is really saying something, the largest known atlantic halibut weighs 705 pounds and reaches 15 feet in length, this fish can dive up to 1, 2 miles deep. and it can live up to 50 years unless of course some lucky fisherman catches it.
On average adult male halibuts are 22-33 pounds, sometimes 55, maybe 99 pounds tops, but based on information on the web, females are sometimes up to 550 pounds, but as it often happens that males related animals can be very different from each other for example the atlantic halibut is related to the cecallan sole but you can actually see the ladder at a depth of 33ft the deepest is 1180ft but this is pretty rare this The The fish is usually eight inches long and rarely grows as long as 14 inches. Feel the difference, but there are other relatives even smaller than the tarfops oligolepis, measuring only 1.8. inches long and weighs 0.07 ounces 0.07 ounces against 705 pounds don’t you think that’s weird? these fish are so similar that they are almost identical in terms of evolution but their difference in size is incredible although nothing in nature happens like this and there certainly must be reasons to make these fish so different first things first animals grow faster in water not long ago we said in one of our videos that it takes 24 million generations for a mouse-sized creature to become a mouse-sized creature.
However, among all mammals, cetaceans, in case you forgot, this group includes whales and dolphins, are the fastest in terms of evolution. It only took about 3 million generations for them to achieve a thousand-fold increase in size. they were super fast and most likely this difference was made possible by the support of water in a literal sense of the word, they probably noticed that bodies seem lighter in water than on land, especially if it is sea water, this This property seems to have helped mammals grow faster and get bigger because water is what makes whales so big on land that their organs would simply be crushed under their own weight, so cetaceans probably wouldn’t. move back on land to If you do this, you’re going to have to lose a lot of weight.
However, if whales or dolphins really wanted to shrink, they could do so 30 times faster than they grow. In any case, this is what scientists postulate. changes in both the body and muscles and this goes hand in hand with many problems solving them takes time and new genes are formed over millions of generations second all mammals develop from one cell gradually increasing in size this means that in order to get smaller, they simply need to stop their growth in time, you must admit that this is much easier than coming up with new schemes to grow, however, the common shrews decided that all these long evolutionary alternative processes that require millions of generations are not they are not worth it either they do not like to store food for the winter or hibernate i.e. do what other small animals usually do the shrews found another way to survive they are born in the summer and grow very quickly to their full size but then when autumn comes , they literally shrink, shrews get smaller and lose between 10 and 2 0 percent of your weight and it’s not just
muscle mass and fat, everything becomes smaller, including your internal organs, even your heart and brain. gradually winter ends and from february shrews start to grow again until they reach their maximum size in spring it is true that their brain doesn’t grow anymore that means it shrinks with each new winter honestly i don’t know but shrews live to 30 months so you hardly notice a difference but the fact that true ones get smaller in winter is strange at first glance this doesn’t make sense because the smaller you are the more energy you need to survive in winter it generates more Energy requires more food and in winter this becomes a real problem, but shrews somehow manage to fool evolution, they consume less energy when they get smaller and scientists have no idea why this happens, although I’m pretty used to the fact that scientists don’t know why a lot of important things happen, but let’s leave the shrews alone and get back to the creatures really and big.
I’m talking about the gigantism of the deep sea. The tendency of sea creatures from the deepest and coldest parts of the ocean to reach colossal sizes squids sea spiders worms and many other species of animals become so large that they can become someone’s nightmare to get to the bottom of things let’s see other giants in today’s video the giant orphanage a huge fish of the rayfend class that looks more like a ribbon with fins that can be found all over the world lives as deep as 0.6 miles deep and reaches 26 feet long although there have been reports of unconfirmed specimens ns up to 36ft long usually of course measured at a modest 10 to 16ft but it was the giant oarfish that was mentioned in the guinness world records as the longest bony fish in the world.
There are various accounts of the impressive size around 1885. Maine fishermen caught a 25-foot-long specimen, and on July 18, 1963, a team of marine laboratory scientists detected a 50-foot-long specimen off the coast of New Jersey, like all giant creatures, the giant oarfish also has smaller relatives, for example the day velifera, which do not go deeper than 330 feet unlike their big brother which goes down 0.6 miles below the faraday valley measuring only up to 12 inches this is much less than the length of any of its relatives and the vela faraday also looks more like a normal length normal fish not like the giant oarfish in general the giant oarfish looks more like sea serpents giants, it is believed that this elongated fish actually inspired the legends about such creatures told by different people, but despite the their terrifying size and all sorts of myths surround them.
The giant oarfish does not pose any danger to people. Come on, these guys eat plankton. They don’t even have real teeth. because the meat of the giant oarfish looks like slime, which is unappealing even for people with unusual tastes, that is, people, of course, tried to eat it, but the flabby and sticky fish did not impress anyone well, on the other hand , at least some species won’t be facing extinction at the same time. This is one of the reasons why the species is poorly studied. Anglers just throw in giant oarfish even if they accidentally catch them.
Scientists have no specimen to study. on the surface in shallow water it is much harder to find krill that giant oarfish feed on, but it is all too easy to be damaged by wind and waves, can you imagine this? Without food the waves beat you to death there is absolutely nothing you can do about it so the shallower the water the more serious the danger so all the giant oarfish people notice nearby from the shore are already dead or die sad but true, completely. i forgot to mention a fun fact about the giant oarfish, there is a myth that it is a harbinger of earthquakes, in any case, if the giant oarfish is sighted off the coast of Japan, then that’s it, you should expect disaster, modern scientists consider this nonsense, but there is still some logic behind these deep-sea creatures could be more sensitive to any tectonic activity.
The next underwater giants we’ll talk about are giant isopods. Wait who, what is this creature that looks both crab and armadillo? So it’s not surprising because the ocean is full of creatures that even scientists don’t know anything about, there are incredibly many of them, but how is this possible? Well, actually there are two reasons for that: first, the ocean is too big, many parts of it are simply impossible to reach, too deep, too cold, too dangerous, too many challenges, second, the scientific community is very slow, to describe new species takes a long time, it is difficult. it requires technical acumen not to mention experts who are always in short supply at the same time local fishermen may have known about animals unknown to science for generations and do not even suspect that this could be the greatest discovery for scientists at the same time new species are constantly being described, I’m not kidding, taxonomists, that is, biologists who classify organisms, are always busy, for example, in 2020 they described 359 new species of fish, as well as many oceanic invertebrates, scientists describe a new species of shark or animal related approximately every two weeks and These are not necessarily new discoveries.
Samples can wait in the archives for years, even decades, before their turn comes. I don’t even know how. the years it would take to describe all the animals in the ocean now let’s get back to the giant isopods in fact these are crustaceans that are very distantly related to shrimp and crabs giant isopods prefer cold water they can be found at depths of up to 1.5 miles and this is an absolute record, not all creatures can go that deep, the maximum length of such isopods reaches 20 inches, but there are reports of 30-inch long specimens, well, there is no proof at all, but I think it is very possible regular isopods grow to about three. to six inches while isopods that live in deep cold water develop deep sea gigantism and feel great yes there may not be much food on the bottom but giant isopods can live for years between meals just not they are in a hurry, they are perfectly adapted to their lifestyle, in fact, giant isopods are scavengers that eat everything that falls on them from the upper layers of the ocean.
When you live like this, you never know if you’ll have dinner tomorrow or inside. five years, so if suddenly a big carcass sinks to the bottom, giant isopods eat non-stop, they eat so much that they bloat and can barely move, but on the other hand, this food will last them quite a long time, so they are kind . of deep-sea hamsters and if that doesn’t tell you how voracious giant isopods are, here’s a fact: once scientists dumped a crocodile carcass as deep as 6,600 feet, it took less than a day for the isopods to penetrate the thick skin and get to the meat its not clear how long it took them to eat the crocodile but i guess they did it in a few days we finally got to a question that would surely come up sooner or later i told them what is deep sea gigantism but how do you do it do the animals it actually gets so big there must be a reason for that correct scientists suggest there are four factors at play here the low temperatures few people wonder how cold the ocean water is of course it all depends on the latitude , it is warmer at the equator than at the poles as for the department.
The deeper you go, the less sunlight penetrates the water layers. Less light means lower temperatures. The deep ocean, which is everything 656 feet below the surface, is quite cold. Its average temperature is only 39 degrees Fahrenheit, but it can sometimes drop to 32 degrees. This water is denser and heavier, it’s not affected by seasonal changes, it’s just a big cold layer where everything is stable, just to give you a rough idea, the water in Antarctica on the surface is about the same temperature as a Untrained person can survive in such water for 10-15 minutes depending on various factors, but eventually we will die, we are just not designed to live in such water temperatures, but deep-sea gigantism came up with animals.
Thescientists studied this phenomenon and concluded that lowering the temperature leads to an increase in cell size and increased lifespan that cold water creates the exact conditions that make deep-sea animals grow really big the japanese spider r crab is a perfect illustration of how this works it also looks like some character from star wars does it of the 60,000 species of crustaceans on earth japanese spider crabs are the largest spanning up to 150 inches from the tip of their one fore claw to the other prefers to live in cold water as deep as 1640ft and feels great there seriously the lifespan of Japanese spider crab is a hundred years on average of course a size like that comes with a substantial weight that can reach 44 pounds, I think you can imagine how small the relatives of Japanese spider crabs can be naturally when you are as big and ridiculous as a japanese spider crab you will surely be slow these guys don’t hunt they choose to scavenge and this. in turn leads us to another factor that causes the gigantism of the deep sea lack of food most of the food is found in shallow waters which is where it is hot the deeper you dive the scarcer the food in such conditions it is advantageous to be big bigger animals can travel greater distances in search of food also giant creatures have amazingly efficient metabolisms because that’s how biochemistry works there’s even kleiber’s rule that establishes a relationship between metabolic rate and body weight maybe that’s the rule that was hacked by shrews since the beginning of the video in simple words you can describe it like this the bigger you are the more efficient your metabolism is and when there is not much food around the efficiency becomes especially important meanwhile the following factor is derived of the lack of food security, as I said, most food can be found in shallow water, which also means it’s where you’re most likely to become prey to a
predator no matter what species you’re sure there will be someone who doesn’t mind eating you evolutionarily doesn’t have to live a long life if you live on the surface as well for regeneration because it requires a lot of strength and resources from you will be eaten anyway but as you go deeper you will find fewer predators so it is partly due to lack of predators in the deep sea that giant creatures can live so long and have such a long life at great depths. very stable as i said not even seasonal temperature changes storms arent a concern for giant sea creatures either remember giant oarfish die when hit by waves on the bottom thats not a problem and now it’s time to remember another giant creature. and this is a sponge hmm how do i put it to make it clearer? well if spongebob was this type of sponge it would look like this actually these sponges can be found in all oceans of the world they can live at any depth but sometimes grow to incredible size not far from hawaii 1.3 miles deep they found a sponge that measures eleven by seven feet yes it is like a minivan only in the water and fluffy the smallest sponges can reach several inches but let’s not talk about them due to the fact that this giant sponge is also very old it is much more exciting when i say very old i mean it could be 2300 years old or even older in any case this is how scientists estimate the age of large sponges that live in s hallows water but i am not done with the factors that can cause the gigantism in the deep sea and next is oxygen, it makes perfect sense that you can’t grow if you’re suffocating in 1999, scientists proved that size potent An organism’s maximum cial correlates directly with increased dissolved oxygen levels in deeper water the deeper you go the higher the oxygen solubility and large organisms may well, shall we say, breathe more deeply but it’s not just that animals at great depths use oxygen, they consume cold water very slowly, it reduces the rate of their metabolism but there is never a lack of oxygen.
It turns out that animals do not need to keep it, growing more without fear of lack of oxygen. Cold environment helps animals grow but I have further proof of this theory or rather an entire continent in the water around it before people encountered deep sea giants elsewhere in the world’s oceans, They were found near the South Pole, yes, in Antarctica. Huge sea creatures don’t need to go deep, where not even devices more advanced humans can reach. You can find gigantic creatures close to the surface. The shallows are home to giant sea slugs, sponges, worms, sea spiders, and even giant single-celled organisms—can you imagine a huge cell?
They live in Antarctica. All of them can be found within arm’s reach at about 29 feet down compared to the miles we’re talking about today. Antarctica makes things as simple as life in such a cold environment can be, of course, and since we’re talking about Antarctic waters again, it’s time to remember the colossal squid. This guy can get pretty comfortable even at 1.2 miles down. staying somewhere at a depth of 0.4 miles below at the same time, the smallest relatives of colossal squids live in shallow water somewhere near the reefs of the Bahamas and, of course, differ in size the The colossal squid is about 14 times longer than the New Zealand common arrow squid, just look at this monster alongside the whale to understand how big it is.
In general, giant squids are not particularly different from their smaller ken. and the eyes, though they do have some advantages that are essential when you’re this big, like toothy suckers for catching large prey and incredibly large eyes. However, we recently made a video about this. squid in more detail, can we draw any conclusions from all this reasoning, which of the factors affects the animals the most, turning them into deep-sea giants? Well, if you ask the scientists, they’ll guess that yes, scientists aren’t sure of anything that anyone has yet. i figured out how exactly these evolutionary mechanisms that lead to a sharp increase in size work they just happen and that’s it ok let’s give the science a little more time personally i think the k The key factors are the low temperature which allows creatures to slow down their metabolism and a large amount of oxygen that allows for unlimited cell growth.
It seems that nothing else is required. The rest are just nice bonuses. dinosaurs, the first of them was quite small, but then there was a sharp increase in the oxygen level in the atmosphere from 15 to 19 percent, according to scientists, it was the increase in oxygen levels that helped the dinosaurs to grow large enough to become giant sauropods. it was definitely one of the factors see you later