Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1888 — In the Deep Sea. [ARTICLE]

In the Deep Sea.

As plants do not live in the deep sea, the deep-sea animals either prey on one another or get their food from dead organism and plants which sink down to them. Thus Maury says: “The sea, like the snow-cloud with its flakes in a calm, is always letting fall upon its bed showers of microscopic shells.” And experiment proves that a tiny shell would take about a week to fail from the surface to the deepest depths. Since sunlight does not penetrate much farther than the littoral zone, there would be beyond this perpetual darkness except for phosphorescence. Many of the animals inhabiting the continent il and abyssal zones have merely rudimentary eyes. But theje blind creatures have very long feelers, which help them to grope their way along the bottom. Other deep sea animals, on the contrary, have enormous eyes, and these very likely congregate around such of their number as are phosphorescent, and may perhaps follow the moving lamp-pcsts about wherever they go. And so bright is this light on many of the fish brought up by the dredge that during the brief s ace the animals survive it is not difficult to read by it. The reason why fishes and mollusks living more than three miles under water are able to bear a pressure of several tons is that they have exceedingly loose tissues, which allow the water t > flow equally through every interstice and thus to equalize the weight. When the pressure is removed they perish. In the Challefnger expeditions, sent iJtot by the British Government, all the sharks brought up from a depth of a little less than three-quarters of a mile were dead when they got to the surface. —Catholic Magazine.