• MisanthropiCynic@lemm.eeEnglish
    181·
    6 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·
        5 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.

  • whoisearth@lemmy.caEnglish
    21·
    7 days ago

    We are killing the ocean by increasingly acidifying it. This has been known by scientists for decades.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      Ocean acidification occurs because the ocean serves as a carbon sink. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forms weak carbonic acid in ocean water. The ocean has historically been slightly basic, and as it inches towards a neutral pH, it makes it impossible for things like oysters to form their shells.

      One big problem is that it’s one of the biggest carbon sinks. It’s keeping that greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. However - as you might notice if you leave a can of Coke out on a hot day - the solubility of gases in liquids decreases when it’s hotter. The world heats up because of greenhouse gasses, less greenhouse gasses can be stored in the ocean and re-enter the atmosphere, which heats the world up more…

      Then we also have the lovely “ice albedo” positive feedback loop - dark ocean water absorbs more of the suns radiation, sea ice reflects more of it. Sea ice melts as earth heats up, exposing dark ocean which absorbs more heat and melts more ice….

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        Well at least there’s not a fuckton of methane hydrates on the ocean floor that are now releasing a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2 refrom the ocean floor as the water gets warmer. And that isn’t a self-feeding loop that means it’s probably too late to save ourselves now.

        Because that would be bad.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          Methane at least breaks down faster than CO2. Heavier, so stronger effects, but at least the CH4 breaks down after a decade or so instead of centuries.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          Pretty much. We set off several positive feedback loops and punctured the equilibrium, and nature’s going to have to find a new one. Whether or not that can support life as we know it know is up in the air.

          (I didn’t even mention phytoplankton die offs - a lot of the oxygen produced on earth is from photosynthesis happening in the ocean - not from terrestrial plants. So you also have less of a carbon sink in that process as well.)

          When I was a child, long road trips would leave the front grill of our car caked with bugs. When I’d hunt for dandelions with my siblings, leaning close to the ground revealed a world just teeming with activity.

          Now - where are the bugs? Especially with how difficult it is to identify insect species, we’ve probably lost hundreds of thousands of bugs that were never named or studied. How critical were those bugs to their ecosystems?

          It’s difficult to motivate people to care about species of phytoplankton or ants though. Even the “save the bees” thing got twisted into a celebration of non-indigenous species that were brought in for agricultural purposes (wasps are critical for pollination, but not as cute as honey bees I guess.) The more you study ecology, the more you realize how complicated and interlocking it is, the more you realize that most human beings cannot be brought to care without substantial changes to our education system.

    • Lyrl@lemm.eeEnglish
      21·
      6 days ago

      Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.

  • ArtemisimetrA@lemm.eeEnglish
    113·
    7 days ago

    Earth’s atmosphere is an ocean of gas. The ocean is an atmosphere of liquid. Words are made up.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    932·
    7 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·
          6 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·
    7 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·
        7 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.