I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there are large animals that spend their entire lives with nothing but open ocean above, below, and all around them. They spend their entire lives floating around in a blue void. No environmental visual stimuli. Not even getting into the creatures who live deeper than sunlight can reach but still not on the floor. Then, one day, something eats you, and that's it.
>>4846028Says the monkey that only knows grass, trees, rocks, and gas.
>>4846028Ignoring the life and teensy bits of opal, there’s still plenty of visual stimuli. I don’t think our eyes are adapted to see it well, but themoclines and haloclines are still pretty visually striking. Even just the little puddles of soft rain pooling on the ocean’s surface is pretty cool; there’s a video of sea snakes drinking rain that shows it off fairly well. There’s also layers and currents that are drastically chemically distinct from one another. Depth also does some fucky things chemistry-wise, like dissolving all calcium and preventing it from accumulating as sediment.
>>4846028Most fish congregate around structures such as rock, reef, vegetation bed.They only really go through completely open water when they migrating/traveling between those structures
>>4846028>>4846049It's a shame there's so much sound pollution in the ocean now. Being able to communicate over thousands of miles must help make the emptiness less lonesome.
>>4846028The Deep Scattering Layer might as well be considered a landmark in the open ocean. For many creatures, that moving band is often dense enough it could seen as a floor or a celling.
>>4846036we're talking pelagic here nigger, not coastal.
