MBARI - Glass Squid and Deep Sea Mining
The problem is that the ocean water isn't worth anything to the animals living in it, because they don't have any money to pay for it. Maybe the answer is to give them all Universal Credit or something so that they can get jobs and save up to buy their own water from the mining companies. See What is Water Worth On the Free Market?
From the video description:
Glass squids (family Cranchiidae) live in the boundless waters of the twilight, or mesopelagic, zone. With no protective shell and nowhere to shelter, they need to get creative. Transparency is one way to thrive in a home with few places to hide.
Like other cephalopods, glass squids are covered in tiny pigment sacs called chromatophores. They often keep their chromatophores closed so their skin is basically see through. This invisibility cloak hides them from both predators and prey.
When the glass squid’s cover is blown, they expand their chromatophores to darken their appearance. Some may fill their body cavity with ink instead, presumably to blend into the darkness. And when danger still looms, a glass squid may ink into the water and jet away. A ghostly shroud of ink creates a distraction so the squid can escape.
But the future of midwater animals is in jeopardy. The deep seafloor holds buried treasure: nodules of precious minerals critical to modern technologies. Mining these metals will release plumes of wastewater that will cloud the ocean's twilight zone. Investigating how deep-sea animals sense their surroundings will help us predict how much harder mining will make their day-to-day lives.
We urgently need to identify the impacts deep-sea mining will have across all ocean habitats, from the midwater to the seafloor. Help protect the glass squid by sharing what you've learned. Together we can build a community of ocean champions!
Learn more about this and other fascinating animals of the deep: https://mbari.co/AnimalsOfTheDeep
Learn more about the possible impacts of deep-sea mining: https://annualreport.mbari.org/2020/...:
Interest in mining the deep seafloor for copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, and other valuable metals has grown substantially in the last decade. In some areas, metallic nodules are scattered on the seafloor. Elsewhere, precious metals valuable to the technology industry are found in hydrothermal chimneys. These finds have created a "gold rush" of sorts in the deep sea. ...
To collect the valuable minerals from the seafloor, mining companies use a sort of vacuum to pull up the metallic nodules, along with the silt and water surrounding them. The material is brought to a ship at the surface, where the minerals are removed, and the byproduct silt and toxicant-enriched fluids are discharged back toward the seafloor. The process is also extraordinarily noisy.
Why it Matters
The animals that live in the deep ocean midwaters are crucial to the global food web. Mining operations in the deep sea could harm the diversity of life near and above the mining sites.
Each mining ship is estimated to discharge between two million and 3.5 million cubic feet of sediment and water every day. Some, but not all, of the discharge will make it back to the site of the mining extraction, which itself will remain scarred for years. The materials that don’t settle to the seafloor create plumes that do not remain within a certain boundary in the ocean—scientists project some of the sediment may drift hundreds of miles with ocean currents. Nothing will prevent it from traveling to areas purportedly set aside for protection from mining.
Rays and Skates
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