ice cream or smoothies? swimsuits or summer dresses? picnics or beach trips? rivers or lakes? flowers or woodland? pink or yellow or green? sunrise or sunset? drive in movies or barbecues? roses or peonies? butterflies or bees? barefoot or sandals? cotton or lace? pools or the ocean?
growing up I never understood why people would get so excited for summer and being able to “finally enjoy outside” until I realized I just live in California. you people don’t get consistent 90/32° days by late May. rain is not a distant memory for you, but a regular visitor. the outside world is not an immediate death trap devoid of moisture. your summers are brief and do not last an entire half of the year. everything is green and colorful rather than brown and a potential fire hazard. it’s not even technically summer yet, not for another month, and it’s already too hot for us to bear. To the summer enjoyers, appreciate what you have. I am very sweaty
As someone that has grown up surrounded by beaches and done surf life saving, I know how the sea works. Lots of people dont. Every summer multiple tourists die here because they don’t respect the sea, if you’re going to the coast, here’s a thing I saw on Facebook.
wow.
reblogging for all of us that grew up in land locked states, then visit the ocean and are used to just plunging into a lake.
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.
Take a deep breath and jump into Manchester Orchestra’s latest music video. Directed by kitty + frido, “The Ocean” features incredible footage of world record-setting deep sea driver William Trubridge.
“The Ocean” is off Manchester Orchestra’s new album HOPE, a stripped down re-working of the band’s April release COPE.
