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Octopus with transparent head caught by blackwater photographer
- jfengel 6y agoTIL: "black water diving" is night diving, especially over a very deep zone. It sounds like you don't really go any deeper than ordinary open-water diving, but you get to see creatures migrating from much deeper than you would ordinarily get to see. Including, apparently, a lot of transparent juveniles. (I'm not exactly clear on why juveniles in particular can be transparent.)
- rfreytag 6y agoCould be that not being transparent affords an advantage in finding a mate and reproduction. Juveniles might not need to find a mate yet so only need to hide and survive.
- billiam 6y agoThis is correct. They go through stages for functional reasons (features to help them float along and catch planktonic food while they are devoting all their energy to growing) as well as reasons we don't much understand related to how they end up in their environments.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoSo law enforcement doesn't catch them painting graffiti.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y agoArticle says 50m. But they are tethered to the boat. It’s not recreational diving.
- jfengel 6y agoAh, thanks for pointing that out. That makes sense. PADI sets some very stiff requirements to go to 50 meters.
- chmod775 6y agoYou can dive as an recreational activity at any depth your could dive 'professionally'. In fact 40-50 meters is a pretty normal depth for experienced recreational divers.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y agoI’m not sure where you’ve been diving or if youre intentionally being pedantic. Your typical open water course qualifies you for depths to 30m. I’ve been past 40m, but on air you’re not staying there very long (let alone 50m). And if I remember my nitrox training correctly, on EAN 35 you want to stay at 30ish meters or shallower. My insurance through DAN also only covers me for up to 30m. Most of the colourful corals and fish that you see on TV, typically at shallower depths anyway. Past 30m you definitely need further qualifications and more gear if you want to hang out at those depths.
- chmod775 6y agoFirst off, I'm not diving in the US and I'm not well-versed in how insurance/rules are there. Secondly, yes. You should have proper training and experience. And that's why I said 'experienced' divers. I wouldn't count myself among them with my less than 50 dives and lack of qualifications. However I personally know quite a few experienced divers (most of them have >1k dives total) who do this kind of thing a few times a year. Usually to spend a few minutes looking at wrecks. Granted, I am positively surrounded by people with way more experience than myself so I may have a skewed image of what is normal.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y agoI’m not in the US either. I’ve clocked at least 100 dives. I stopped counting at 70. I assume you’re somewhat familiar with the conditions of your insurance. If you’re diving regularly without insurance, I’d suggest you go get some. Doing wreck dives at 60m is not like recreational diving. Different air mix to get those depths and stay for any significant period. The guys I’ve talked to, leave extra tanks at the half way point for deco. Otherwise you won’t have enough air. Compared to ‘recreational’ diving: call up your buddy, check conditions, get tanks, walk off the beach. And you are supposed to stay within your no-decompression limits. If something goes wrong, in theory you can surface immediately. The deco stop is a precaution only.
- bmitc 6y agoIt remains interesting to me that space exploration yields so much excitement when we have an essentially unexplored alien world with alien creatures right here. I have little idea why reaching a dead, likely lifeless, planet is more exciting than the ocean. Additionally, better understanding the ocean would better prep us to be able to properly explore planets and moons.
- fxtentacle 6y agoIt might be as primitive as people naturally preferring to sit on a high place and looking down.
- rowanG077 6y agoCalling ocean creatures alien is wrong. They aren't alien. The interest in space travel is simple to me. We can possibly learn about real aliens. We can also ensure humanities survival even in the event that the Earth is completely gone. Studying the ocean is just mostly about learning some semi interesting biology and mostly boring geology.
- ncmncm 6y agoOther humans are aliens. It is all a matter of degree. Octopods are about as alien an intelligence as we have on Earth. It is easy to imagine less-alien outsider aliens "X is just mostly..." is a reliable way to begin a falsehood.
- hermitcrab 6y agoThey are alien in that they are adapted to a totally different environment to us. But not alien in that they are a branch off the same tree of life as we are. If you are interested in finding out more about octopus evolution and intelligence I recommend: " Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. "My octopus teacher" on Netflix is also well worth a watch.
- jsperson 6y agoI concur - the thing is that Mars is often spoken of as a "lifeboat" for humanity. It will take an awful lot of hard and determined work for us to ever make Earth less hospitable than Mars. Similarly it will take centuries of hard and determined work to ever make Mars as good as the worst possible Earth. Short of a full on nuclear war (small, but nevertheless non-zero probability) we're better off improving what we've got. Note, I'm only addressing the "lifeboat" justification, I still think sending folks to Mars would be cool as hell.
- Jedd 6y agoApart from the benefits to the individual juvenile - to be harder to spot by predators - I wonder if there's some benefit to being able to see what's coming up behind (looking through) one of your siblings. Somewhat aside, I note TFA uses the word octopi, whereas I thought we'd agreed that octopuses was the correct plural?
- op03 6y agoWhat's in the space between the brain and the skin? Is it just transparent fluid - csf? The space between the eyes seems to have something else going on, as in less transparent.
- vmception 6y agoThe space between the eyes is the brain. Although brain is a fluid concept in these creatures, pressure right there will instantly kill the octopus, not because it is another organ but because it is the control center.
- op03 6y agoThe article says the reddish mass(es) is the distributed brain, but was referring to the separate white band between the eyes. Interesting point about pressure.
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoI like that metaphor... in the deep blue you get transparent... :Ð
- hnarn 6y agoIt’s stuff like this that makes me think that we often forget how amazing life really is, and how we take something for granted just because we constantly see it even though we don’t understand anything about it. How there’s this mechanism right before our eyes creating these amazingly and incomprehensibly complex structures, these organisms, that somehow end up with what we can only name “instincts” or “consciousness” because we lack better words. We have no idea how any of this is happening and all we can do is cut it up and maybe look at the pieces through some sharpened glass, like a bunch of chimpanzees smashing apart a thousand dollar wrist watch. The more you think about it, the more captivating, and maybe a little bit sad, it becomes.
- contingencies 6y agoI can heartily recommend joining iNaturalist @ http://inaturalist.org/ http://inaturalist.org/ ... great way to learn about biology, including marine biology.
- PikachuEXE 6y agoThanks for the recommendation Will look what others discovered around my place
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago>maybe look at the pieces through some sharpened glass, like a bunch of chimpanzees smashing apart a thousand dollar wrist watch. Or worse yet, find a way to exploit that destruction for profit. >maybe a little bit sad Personally I find it devastating. Taking a 20,000 foot view of our species and the impact of its presence on this planet is bleak at best.
- grailed 6y agoOh this is so cool! The area between the eyes is the brain, a ring through which the stomach (the sack above the eyes) passes.
- Iwan-Zotow 6y agoI would welcome our Octopi overlords. People in 2020 were a huge disappointment
- dchuk 6y agoThe idea of treading water, 50 meters down, in the middle of the ocean, in pitch black, makes me so anxious just sitting on my couch thinking about it...I couldn’t imagine just...sitting there, knowing that in every direction it effectively goes to infinity but I can’t see much beyond my hand in front of me. Scuba diving is very much not a pursuit for some folks.
- pimlottc 6y agoI've done a dive like this once, it is quite a trippy experience, you really do feel like you are just floating in empty space. You lose all sense of perspective. Even when you're swimming forward, it doesn't seem like you're moving at all.
- leonroy 6y agoWondering if divers can determine up from down in the absence of surface light? I’m guessing they could use the direction bubbles from their air supply are travelling...
- todd8 6y agoIt's very weird and spooky to dive at night like this. Ordinary night diving in relatively shallow water (say 10m) is challenging enough. It is easy to get very disoriented. The reward is seeing an entirely different world. I've seen the strangest inhabitants of coral reefs while diving at night. The article is about photos taken while doing something else, diving in very deep open water at night.