Generally, animal species fall somewhere along a spectrum. How animals live in the ocean also influences their ability to adapt to change. “Their species might be saved by evolution,” says Savoca. (Read about the pregnant whale that died with 50 pounds of plastic in her stomach.)Īnimals that reproduce frequently and have short lifespans, like small fish and plankton, evolve more rapidly. The ocean has essentially become a minefield of plastic. It could take 60,000 years for generations of these long-living species to begin to adapt to living with it, says Savoca. But plastic, for example, has only existed for 60 years-essentially the lifespan of a single animal. Long-living animals, like albatrosses and blue whales, evolve very slowly over thousands of years, because their generations are spaced so far apart. ( Read about the animals that thrive in hostile mountain conditions.) Plastic, unsustainable fishing, ocean acidification, and warming waters, among other things, have all made the ocean a more hostile place for the animals that live there. “It’s a frequent, unabating, constant assault.”įor many animals, evolution simply cannot keep up with human-driven change. “But humans hurt the in a global way, whether through overfishing or plastics or whatever-and we do it very quickly,” Savoca says. Nothing out of the ordinary-it’s just part of deep-sea living for an anglerfish.Īlthough oceans do change over time, such as when Earth has cycled in and out of ice ages, those changes happen gradually, and species evolve to cope. A male digs his teeth into a female and every one of his organs, except his testes, withers away until he’s just a parasite hanging off her body. Swimming around with up to six male fish permanently fused to her body, for example, is just a normal part of life for a female anglerfish. “That environment’s not hostile to them-its like us being in our living rooms,” says Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, in Monterey. What seems mind-boggling to us- a fish’s ability to live five miles under the sea, for instance-is just life for other animals. The species that make the ocean their home have evolved over millennia to thrive in its depths. Traditionally, the ocean wasn’t all that hostile of a place to live.
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