I’m recovering from a concussion and I’m highly distracted by… AAAH MONSTERS!
Today’s Moment of Science… Hey, did you know? Giant Sea Monsters edition.
Nowhere near as delicious with butter and lemon as I hoped, the globster is an honorific given to large blobs of organic mass that wash up on the seashore. A main defining characteristic is that it’s difficult to identify, at least initially. Most famous globsters turn out to be decaying whale carcasses upon closer, presumably stinkier inspection. One infamous unidentified globster (a phrase I didn’t realize I’d be using today) that remains unidentified is still known as ‘Trunko.’ A witness suggested it was a massive polar bear, while modern analysis of the few pictures leans more towards it being more rotten whale ass.
Though the giant siphonophore can technically be longer than the blue whale, does it count as one organism? No, really, I’m asking. This deep sea giant is technically a colony of critters called zooids that all function together as one organism. The zooids are adapted to symbiotic living and couldn’t function on their own all that well, contributing the biological functions to which they’re best suited to the group. They certainly look like one gigundous jellyfish when they stack themselves together, and truly, one self-organized sea monster is plenty.
The giant oarfish is an absurdity of evolution. This spotted bony fish that can grow up to 26 feet long, sports a festive red mohawk, and looks like it has an attitude problem might just be the source of some sea monster rumors. Sometimes it’s been known to swim vertically, like with its nope of a face pointing towards the surface of a water. There are unconfirmed reports of much longer oarbeasties, up to 56 feet long, but that’s a big fish story I choose not to believe.
There are only two things to fear at the bottom of the ocean: the gaming remote that controls your multi-million dollar sub malfunctioning, and deep sea gigantism. The giant isopod looks like a mad scientist decided they wanted a pet bug to put on a leash and, lo, a twenty inch yikes. Typically isopods are about two inches long.
Even the noises are bigger in the deep blue sea. In 1997 an ultra-low frequency sound was recorded by sensors in the ocean. It was named ‘Bloop.’ If you hear it sped up quite a bit it sounds, well, like a pretty big bloop. It was picked up by sensors as far as 3,000 miles away. There were a few minutes of speculation that this noise could have been produced by some heretofore unseen giant guppy. Modeling suggests that a critter large enough to Bloop would have been a smidge hard to miss, likely measuring over twice as long as a blue whale (yes, anything to avoid the metric system). So since there was no such sea monster, what made the Bloop? It was almost certainly an icequake in Antarctica.
Sperm Whale vs. Giant Squid: the first in a long line of niche hentais or AI generated sci-fi classics, surely. But indeed, giant squids are real, measure up to 43 feet long, and they’ll fuck up a sperm whale. Or at least they’ll try to. Sperm whales are often seen with battle scars incurred from these deep sea giants, but for them it’s ultimately just the cost of good calamari.
At the bottom of the ocean are a variety of utterly disturbing things, not the least of which being Riftia pachyptila, or giant tube worms. A distant cousin of earthworms and leeches, these fucking monsters can grow up to nearly ten feet long and they survive in geothermal vents while drowning in orca piss and mother nature’s cabbage farts. They live in symbiosis with types of bacteria that use sulfur compounds in the energy cycle. Scientists haven’t been able to cultivate many of these bacteria, but I think that means they’re supposed to stay at the bottom of the ocean making the spice flow.
This has been your Moment of Science, never setting foot in the ocean again. Maybe not even in a puddle to be on the safe side.
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