Sea Life Superpowers

We've been talking a lot about some really depressing and upsetting shit lately and we're tired of it. So for today I will just talk about something that I love: Sea Life. So the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. at 3.6 billion years ago we find evidence of life starting up and we get multi-cellular organisms 1.2 million years ago and 530 million years ago we have found the first footprints of land life (though there may have been some before. I bring up this timeline because I want to point out how much time sea life has had to evolve. We get some amazing adaptations and specializations thanks to this, and that is what I want to talk about today. Basically if you wanted to find real life iterations of pokemon, the ocean would be the place to do it.

I have lots of favorites when it comes to animals that live in the ocean, but I am only going to talk to you about 4 of them because otherwise I would be typing all day. 

Ostracod: This one a simple little family of crustacean and is kind of unremarkable and tiny: around .2 - 30 mm long.

But there are two reasons it is one of my favorite sea creatures. Firstly, they have two Dicks which launch spring-loaded sperm that can be up to 6 times longer than the male ostracod, which is funny to me. I don't care if you think that's immature, dicks are fucking hilarious. The second is a defensive mechanism that it uses. Light from the surface doesn't travel very far underwater. There is no light past 1000 meters in the ocean, and rarely any good amount of light lower than 200 meters. This helps sea life hide from predators, which is where the ostracod comes into its own. 

That is an ostracod using bioluminescence to escape a cardinal fish. If a predator swallows an ostracod it releases two chemicals which create light when mixed. This makes the predator very visible, which attracts larger fish that want to eat the original predator. This is a great example of a biological fuck you to predators: "eat me and you get eaten". 

Electric Eel: A couple of quick facts I need to get out of the way: though called an eel they are actually a breed of knife fish. Also, these don't live in the sea, but rather in South American rivers, but I decided to include it anyway because it's got motherfucking lightning powers.

These creatures generate up to 600 volts of electricity to stun prey or predators, and sometimes even kill them. On its own, this isn't enough to kill an adult human, since it only produces 1 amp of current. That being said, depending on the path the current took and duration of the shock it could potentially stop a heart. Oh, and they can strobe their current for up to an hour. The other cool thing an electric eel can do is electrolocate. This is similar to echolocation in base principal. The eel generates an electric field and is able to sense any disturbances in the field. It can do this to avoid predators or hunt prey.

Mantis Shrimp: The Oatmeal has covered this little beauty before in much better detail and with a passion that I can only hope to come close to, but nevertheless, I present the Mantis Shrimp!

And it is not just a pretty face! It can see thousands more variations in color than a Human being. Every color you have ever seen; every sunset, every work of art, has been seen through the interaction of three cones in the eye, mantis shrimp have fucking sixteen (the Oatmeal covers this in pretty great detail but its amazing enough to bear some poetry). Also, those claw like appendages on the front of the shrimp shoot out as fast as a bullet, boiling the water around them (though not for long enough to cause lasting damage by itself). And if the bullet claw misses the target, the pressure wave that the claw creates dismembers its prey instead. This amazing little creature can punch holes in glass aquariums, and it is only 12 inches long at the most! Mantis shrimp are amazing little engines of power!

Mimic Octopus: I have a fondness for cephalopods in general. This class of animal include squids, cuttlefish, nautiluses, and octopuses, and my favorite one of them (and probably of all animals in general) is the mimic octopus, also known as the Ditto of the sea. Watch This video:

Hell yeah! Mimicry isn't unique to this creature; coral snakes have a very deadly venom and a very distinctive pattern, but the Mexican milk snake, which is not at all venomous, mimics the coral snakes pattern with a minor different color order (To tell the difference remember this: Red on black, you're OK Jack, yellow and red, you'll wind up dead). Mimic octopuses not only use mimicry but raise it to an art form. Animals that mimic tend to pick one thing and focus on it. This octopus flips them all off with all 8 of its tentacles and turns into 15 different/distinct other animals. And that's just what we have observed. After all, we have only known about this animal since the 90s. This camouflage is not just for escaping predators either, it hunts with it too. It has been observed mimicking a crab looking for a potential mate then devouring other crabs when they got close enough. This is a fantastic use of an evolved defensive trait!

So there you have it, Just a few of my favorite sea creatures. I thought of a bunch more while writing this, so I might do another one of these soon. We have only explored a tiny amount of the ocean. Just imagine what other kinds of badass life could be hiding out there!