Quote:
Originally Posted by ken0042
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no such thing as water pressure as far as fish are concerned. The reason us humans and our submarines react is we have pockets of air inside of us, and the weight of the water does serve to compress that air. But because water cannot compress, a creature that normally lives 1 mile down wouldn't be affected by any sort of pressure if it came back up to 10 feet under water.
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Pressure affects everything. Deep sea creatures can't even breath in different pressures. Think about opening a can of pop. The pop is fine because the pressure in the can keeps the C02 dissolved. Open the can and the lower pressure causes all the gas to come out. Humans acclimated to deeper ocean pressures cannot ascend too quickly or they get the bends because the nitrogen in their bodies come out of solution. The same thing will happen to any organism. There is no creature that will not be affected by compression or decompression. Any life form has some form of liquid and gas in a very precise balance in it. The animals that can manage both shallow and deep ocean survival such as whales are adapted to regulate this because they feed in the deep but must come up to breathe air (as they are mammals). Creatures that are adapted only for deep sea environments will almost always die.
Deep ocean pressure is just the weight of millions of tons of water above you. It'll crush or compress anything whether or not it has air in it. If you bring something designed for the deep up to the surface rapidly, it'll have the opposite problem of expansion. Can anybody say exploding fish?
Also, many of these creatures may be extremely light sensitive since there is no light at those depths. Sunlight could kill them.