Post #4098340

So here's a fun fact that I'm delighted to have learned: apparently, there are, like, way more fish in the sea than we thought. Like ridiculously so. Over ten times our estimates in some cases. And giant squid? You have no idea. Just from how frequently any sign of giant squid was discovered anywhere in the world, we assumed they were extremely rare. Turns out no, they're swarming the fuck out of the deep sea and we had no idea for the longest time. So, how did we find this out? Well, it starts with those same giant squid I just mentioned. It was known that sperm whales feed on giant squid, so some marine biologists started checking the stomach and stool contents of sperm whales, and what they found didn't make much sense. Like 70% of the whales' diets was giant squid. Which would require there to be millions of giant squid. But we rarely ever see giant squid, and all we ever see of giant squid are bloated washed-up corpses, so that doesn't make sense, right? It's gotta be a weird statistical anomaly. So this was more or less dismissed as a theory. Then, a particular marine biologist managed to get her hands on a giant squid eyeball (the size of a G-dang basketball by the way) and did some careful analysis, and found that their eyes had a surprising visual range, way longer than the cameras on deep sea drones we'd been sending down to their supposed habitats and finding none of them. So, new theory: the squids are just hiding from us. The cameras use really bright lights to be able to see in the benthic depths, and this intense light is scaring the squids away from further away than the cameras can see them. This theory is considered silly by most, but she does have the biological data from the eyeball, so eventually she's able to convince people to build a really, really expensive deep sea drone with a really, really powerful camera that can see clearly with barely any light, and can see in lights that, according to the data, these giant squids can't. So, they build this drone, they send it down expecting to see something maaaaybe within a couple days. They see a squid ninety seconds in. Then another. Then another. There are so many fucking squids "Millions" is discovered to be an underestimate. They are fucking EVERYWHERE. There's no escaping them. They're seeing like dozens of squids an hour. Now that we're no longer dropping the fucking sun into their living room, they're no longer running for the valleys as soon as we get close. They tested this out in other oceanic environments, and it's the same deal; there's so much shit than we thought there was, because every time our cameras get close, they've already fled from the mysterious orb of baleful deathlight descending from the unknown heavens. They even dipped this drone into what we thought was the least biologically dense area ON THE PLANET, just a complete ecological dead zone, and once the scary sun camera was gone, we saw so many god damn species of fish, it turned out to be one of the MORE ecologically diverse areas on the planet. Like, not a contender for MOST, but it was up there. Crazy biological diversity. So many fish that humans just never had the opportunity to witness. So yeah, TL;DR it turns out the ocean is WAY more full of life than we thought, we were just throwing a nine bang into the fish party's living room and wondering why there was nobody around after it finished exploding.