What makes lake Baikal so "alien"?Studying it, i get the feeling the place is a mix of an ocean and a lake, but also completely unique.The Baikal sponge, for example, biggest fresh water sponge, also bigger than most salt water one, grows like moss on stones, has a symbiotic relationship with algae and can survive being frozen for long periods of time.
>>5142449Lake Baikal is so alien seeming because it is 25-30 million years old. The native endemic species have had a lot of time to specialize and diversify. Most lakes are not nearly this old, and one of the next oldest, Lake Tanganyika, is still considered a hotbed of diversity despite being only half the age of Baikal.It would be interesting to see if the purportedly older lake Zaysan, in Kazakhstan is as special as Baikal, but the age of Zaysan is controversial and I don’t see any easily googleable surveys of its life, and its location on the river systems might make it more difficult for endemics to arise than Baikal, since it’s so much less “remote”.
It's alien because it is literally inhabited by aliens.
>>5142951Tell me about Baikal Seal.Why does he have the giant orbular pitch black eyes?
>>5142962>Why does he have the giant orbular pitch black eyes?For one they have the largest eyes in proportion to body size of any pinniped, so naturally they look very distinct, but it's also mostly down to them being already a pretty small seal species as they have adapted to the smaller range of habitat that an inland lake like the Baikal can provide. Some biologists even believe they didn't even arive at the inland lake naturally, but were instead introduced to it by human settlers around the region, making them almost like a psudo-domesticated species of seal (which with how well they take to training is not difficult to believe).The other reason is the lake itself as the baikal lake is the deepest lake in the entire world at 5,387 feet of depth. For context the lake superior is 2nd deepest lake in the world but only has 1300 feet of depth, but you could shove any military style submarine in the lake baikal and it will be crushed if it tried to reach the bottom of the baikal, it's that deep. How does this all relate to the baikal seal and its eyes? Well the baikal seal primarily fishes for food by diving deep into the lake where visibility is incredibly low, so their eyes are heavily adapted for it. Coincidentally a baikal seals maximum diving depth is also 1300 feet, meaning they could go to the bottom of lake superior and back.In effect the lake baikal is alien because it is deep enough to be practically alien, just like the ocean. Chuck some seals in there and you get alien seals.
Obligatory
>>5144756>No mention of the Baikal swimmersFake news.
>>5142449I'm convinced a small species of cephalopod lives there we havent found yet
>>5146709Considering how fucking deep it is, there can be a lot of cool shit down there.But freshwater cephalopds have never been found, it seem that in their hundreds of millions of years of existing on this planet, they never made the transition.Kinda like there where no freshwater or land trilobites.
>>5146879My wish is that one of the vast number of prehistoric freshwater sharks has a relict population somewhere. There were literally dozens of species of freshwater orectolobiform sharks in North American rivers in the Cretaceous and I wish they were still alive.
>>5142951>>5142962>>5142975that's a scary looking mf
>>5146879>land trilobitesArent those basically pillbugs?
>>5146981You don't know the half of it.
