Lobsters have urine nozzles under their eyes, and pee in each otherβs faces to communicate.
Lobsters have olfactory sensory neurons, located in the aesthetasc sensilla on their antennules, which allow them to detect the pheromones in the urine of other lobsters.
A dominant male lobster will pee to signal his dominance and deter other males from his territory. Females may also pee to signal their readiness for mating, and the urine of a dominant male can attract females.
Lobsters also communicate through touch and by using their claws, but no one really gives a fuck after reading about the pee thing.
Im interested in the claw communication! How does that work?
Also, the pee stuff is hilarious
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 βwhale fallβ and itβs a major source of energy for deep ocean ecosystems.
Sometimes I wonder if a shipping container full of billionaires would have a similar effect.
That seems like a waste of a perfectly good shipping container.
Why donβt we just use environmentally friendly hemp ropes and locally sourced boulders?
There are lakes in the ocean called brine lakes/pools. Brine is essentially concentrated saltwater; its high salinity means itβs denser than water. On rare occasions, brine doesnβt 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, subnauticaβs lost river is based off of this. No big leviathans in real life though, at least none observed yetβ¦
Video for fun: https://youtu.be/ZwuVpNYrKPY
It was never stated but I always assumed the βgooβ referred to industrial waste. But SpongeBob creator Steve Hillenburg was an actual marine biologist and would have been well aware of brine pools, so thatβs probably right.
Brine can be from industrial waste
Technically, brine just means a high concentration of salt in a fluid. It doesnβt 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 itβs released. Large amounts dumped at once is the reason for manmade brine pools.
There are entire levels of the ocean where ecosystem is fed on the slow sinking of dying animals.
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.
Back to the horrors of the deepβ¦
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 canβt get out.
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 itβs become a core component of their identity and everyone knows about it
Even had a ballet about it
wtf