TMAO works by binding to water molecules, preventing water from being forced into protein structures and providing more room in the cell for proteins to do their job. If a protein cannot keep its shape or bind to its target, it cannot perform its function! One example of a deep-sea adaptation is the use of small organic molecules, like trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), to allow proteins to their job normally. Proteins are often called the workhorses of the cell these molecules have a particular shape which allows them to bind to and modify other molecules. Deep in the ocean, a protein from a land animal would be deformed as water under high pressure is pushed to the center of the protein. This incredible stressor has driven the evolution of adaptations in fishes and other deep-sea organisms. Now imagine what the pressure must be like seven miles below sea surface, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench the pressure would be eight TONS psi ! This presents an incredible challenge to life in the ocean, because the deeper you go, the more pressure your body and all its parts (lungs, cells, proteins!) must withstand. If you’ve ever swam to the bottom of a pool, you can already feel extra pressure on your head and ears. Every ~112 feet you descend into the ocean, there is one additional atm of pressure acting on your body. This amount of pressure is called an atmosphere (atm). At sea level, earth’s atmosphere exerts 14.6 pounds of pressure per square inch (psi) of your body’s surface. So what happened to blobfish? Barotrauma! This term refers to physical trauma caused to an organism from rapidly changing environmental pressure levels. Footage from the E/V Nautilus of alive blob sculpins (aka blobfish), looking a little less like yesterday’s jello. A blobfish at sea level is not so appetizing… (Source: kinskarije)įigure 2. What you might not know is that blobfish, formally known as blob sculpin ( Psychrolutes phrictus), does not look like a blobfish, at least not 9,200 feet (1.7 mi) below the surface of the ocean. It has made its way around the world in memes, stuffed animals, and even featured in Saturday Night Live. Luckily, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority has closed some of their habitat to fishing, so hopefully there’ll be less blobfish bycatch in the future.Blobfish rose quickly to internet fame for its sad, saggy, mucousy looking face (Fig 1). When they are inadvertently caught, they’re known as bycatch, and it’s a huge problem for many other non-food species of fish as well. Fisherman use trawlers to catch deep-sea delicacies like orange roughy and crustaceans in their native environment, and sometimes blobfish just happen to get swept into these nets, too. Nevertheless, scientists think that these interesting fish are declining due to fishing activity. It’s likely that no one really knows how many blobfish there are. They’re also very hard to find (how likely are you really to come across a blobfish in your adventures?), and not very photogenic, unlike red wolves or whooping cranes. No one is crowding into expensive restaurants asking for the Blob of the Day. It’s difficult to get good population numbers on the blobfish because it’s not a very important species economically. The same thing happens with the blobfish, minus the pool and lots of people part. Imagine putting a water balloon in a pool full of people: it would just kind of float along across the bottom of the pool. Its body composition gives it just the right buoyancy to float along across the bottom of the sea without having to expend much effort. In fact, the blobfish looks very different when in its natural environment at the bottom of the sea-it appears much more compressed and fish-like (but still quite odd-looking, even for a fish).īeing a gelatinous blob also helps the blobfish with its coach-potato attitude. This is an advantage in the crushing depths where it lives by being made out of gelatinous, blobby material, the blobfish can keep itself from being crushed due to water pressure. Most of its body mass is gelatinous, and it has very few hard bones. You might think that being a blob would be a disadvantage, but for the blobfish lifestyle, it actually helps. They tend to float along, just off the bottom of the sea, eating whatever happens to float right in front of them and is small enough to fit into their mouths. At depths of 2,000 feet or greater, the water pressure is crushing-more than 60 times that of water at the surface! If you lived down that deep, you’d probably be squished into a blob, too.įortunately for the blobfish, they’ve adopted a way of living that allows them to survive just fine as a blob in the deep ocean. Blobfish live in deep water just off the ocean floor around southeastern Australia and Tasmania. As it turns out, the blobfish has good reason to be so ugly: its habitat shaped it that way.
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