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Asked by anon-253597 on 7 May 2020.
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Poppy Cooney answered on 7 May 2020:
Hey Lilla, good question! This depends a lot on where in the world you are and how deep the ocean is. We call the big expanses of sea bed between continents the Abyssal Plain, it’s usually 3000+ metres deep and that makes it super hard to study in detail. From what we know there is huge variety of bacteria and worms that live in the sand/sediment as well as some fish that have adapted to the extreme pressure of living so deep.
Food is a big challenge on the ocean floor too, because sunlight only lights the first few hundred metres of water, algae and plants can’t grow in deep oceans. The animals and bugs that live down there usually rely on food drifting down from above in the form of “marine snow”. Some cool exceptions to this exist around hydrothermal vents, where super-heated water and sulphur is released from the Earths crust. Bacteria that can eat sulphur and crabs and worms that can use the bacteria thrive here in some of the only systems in the world that don’t get their energy from the sun!
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Daire Harvey-Carroll answered on 7 May 2020:
This is one of my favourite topics! Life at the bottom of the ocean is so strange and different. There are no plants as they need sunlight to live. There are lots of animals though! They live off what we call “marine snow” – that’s little bits of dead plants and animals that are washed out to sea and gradually make their way to the bottom. This is enough to support jellyfish and other filter feeders.
Then we have predators that feed on the filter feeders! Giant squid, glow in the dark angler fish and fish with see-through heads all find a way to live without any sunlight. Lots of these animals produce their own glowing light to attract either mates or prey! Then there are whales that dive right to the bottom of the ocean to catch and eat giant squid.
In some places there are underwater volcanoes that produce lots of heat and chemicals. Tiny microscopic life -so small you can’t even see it – has found a way to turn this heat and chemicals into foot and then there are giant muscles and worms the size of your head that live by eating them!
Unfortunately plastic bottles and bags have also found their way to the bottom of the ocean where they can hurt these different kinds of life.
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Charlotte Walker answered on 7 May 2020:
Hi LillaP,
The bottom of the ocean is different all over the world! As a marine biologist I’m interest in the life that lives deep deep down in the dark at the bottom of the ocean. Cool deep seas creatures include the Angler Fish, which shines a little light in front of its huge mouth to attract its prey. The sperm whale is one of the deepest divers in the animal kingdom, it can dive up to 2,000m to hunt for squid to eat! Then you get deep sea giant isopods which look like big versions of our garden woodlice.
You should google deep sea creatures, they have really cool adaptations and look crazy!
Thanks for your question
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Rehemat Bhatia answered on 7 May 2020:
We can find so many things! One of my favourite features are hydrothermal vents. Poppy and Daire have explained this really well 🙂
Comments
anon-253597 commented on :
Thank you! That was very interesting to read.