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Updated: May 25, 2025
Even the fixed animals of the sea, growing, like plants, fast to the rocks, are frequently vivid with living light, and there is a splendid suggestion of nature's powers of adaptation, which may not be entirely inapplicable to the problems of life on strange planets, in Alexander Agassiz's statement that species of sea animals, living below the depths to which sunlight penetrates, "may dwell in total darkness and be illuminated at times merely by the movements of abyssal fishes through the forests of phosphorescent alcyonarians."
The abyssal deeps have two floors or roofs. In the highest, is the so-called neritic zone, the oceanic surface, diaphanous and luminous, far from any coast. Next is seen the pelagic zone, much deeper, in which reside the fishes of incessant motion, capable of living without reposing on the bottom.
On perceiving a victim nearby, the gigantic cuttle-fishes become illuminated like livid suns, moving their arms with death-dealing strokes. All the abyssal beings have their organs of sight enormously developed in order to catch even the weakest rays of light. Many have enormous, protruding eyes. Others have them detached from the body at the end of two cylindrical tentacles like telescopes.
The Minister of Marine, wishing to obtain scientific results, gave orders to form, when possible, a marine zoological collection, and to carry on surveying, deep-sea soundings, and abyssal thermometrical measurements. The officers of the ship received their different scientific charges, and Prof.
The corpses of the neritic animals and of those that swim between the two waters are the direct or indirect sustenance of the abyssal fauna. These beings with weak dental equipment and sluggish speed, badly armed for the conquest of living prey, nourish themselves with the dropping of this rain of alimentary material.
In spite of the continual traps of the fishermen, the marine herds keep themselves intact because of their infinite powers of reproduction. The fauna of the abyssal depths where the lack of light makes all vegetation impossible, is largely carnivorous, the weak inhabitants usually devouring the residuum and dead animals that come down from the surface.
The plancton is the life that floats in loose clusters or forming cloud-like groups across the neritic surface, even descending to the abyssal depths. Wherever the plancton goes, there is living animation, grouping itself in closely packed colonies.
The animal-plants, motionless as stars, surround their ferocious mouths with a circle of flashing lights, and immediately their diminutive prey feel themselves as irresistibly drawn toward them as do the moths that fly toward the lamp, and the birds of the sea that beat against the lighthouse. None of the lights of the earth can compare with those of this abyssal world.
I think it probable that we shall have to wait some time for a sufficient explanation of the origin of the abyssal red clay, no less than for that of the sublittoral greensand in the intermediate zone. But the importance of the establishment of the fact that these various deposits are being formed in the ocean, at the present day, remains the same; whether its rationale be understood or not.
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