#ocean layers

"With careful planning and a little luck, researchers found a surprising upside to hurricanes after a Category 4 storm disrupted their expedition off the coast of Mexico.

The team was able to sample the ocean right after the storm passed and found that the storms churn the ocean so powerfully and deeply—up to thousands of meters—that nutrient-rich, cold water is brought to the surface.

The resulting phytoplankton blooms—visible in satellite imagery taken from space—are a feast for bacteria, zooplankton, small fish, and filter-feeding animals such as shellfish and baleen whales.

"When we got there, you could actually see and smell the difference in the ocean," said Professor Michael Beman. "It was green from all the chlorophyll being produced. There were totally different organisms there, and they were going nuts in the wake of the storm."

But all that mixing also stirs up low-oxygen zones deep in the water, bringing them much nearer the surface than usual, threatening organisms that need higher oxygen concentrations to survive."

Brought to you by a marine biologist and @geckosquid who requested it!

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We have covered octopuses in general here when we covered the regular Octopus. Today, we’re looking at an octopus brand new to the AC series as of New Horizons - it’s the Umbrella Octopus!

This one frustrates me a little bit, and I’ll get into it in a bit. They aren’t really all that rare, although there are a ton of more common things you will get before this, so just keep trying. Luckily it’s available all day and night.

Octopuses are mollusks, just like a lot of the creatures you can catch by diving. There are a lot of species in Octopoda, the Order all octopuses all belong. They’re different from squids in many ways, most notably in their arm and tentacle configuration, in which they only have 8 arms. “Arms” in this case, refer to the long appendages around their mantle, and they have suckers from body to tip, whereas tentacles only have suckers at the ends. This is where the similarities between the Octopus and Umbrella Octopus end, though. Going further into the Order, there is Suborder Cirrina, which are the deep sea octopuses that have a small, internal shell to which attach their fins. They are truly strange! Going even further is Family Opisthoteuthidae, the Umbrella Octopuses. They all have this look where their arms are connected by thick webbing that make them look like open umbrellas when stretched out. V appropriate naming, eh? The species in ACNH in particular is the Flapjack Octopus, also called “Mendako” in Japan (Opisthoteuthis californiana).

Now, what bothers me about this, is that Blathers puts the Umbrella Octopus in the coral reef tank, and, according to my research for this entry, Umbrella Octopuses just don’t live on coral reefs. They are all typically deep-sea creatures that mostly live in the Aphotic (or, without light) regions of the ocean, and this includes the Flapjack. As a post-larval octopus, it will live at the very edge of the Neritic zone, the zone of the ocean in which light still penetrates to the bottom, about 660 ft (200m), but adults, which I’m assuming the ACNH model is based, live beyond 1000 ft (500m). They certainly aren’t living on corals...if anyone knows more, let me know! (There are such things as deep sea corals (VERY cool), but that’s just not the type of coral reef exhibited in the museum, so doesn’t count). 

But let’s talk about the layers of the ocean, since I know we’ve touched upon it every time we’ve spoken about deep sea creatures. The ocean is a 3D place - unlike land, in which most biomes are considered horizontally (except maybe forests, in which the canopy is a biome), the ocean is considered horizontally and vertically. Animals that live near the surface couldn’t survive down at the bottom of the ocean basin, in the same way a polar bear can’t live in Tahiti. Yeah...it is that different. Here’s a great graph to show these differences:

The Neritic zone would be the portion up there over the continental shelf, which is the submerged edges of the continents (in some places, like California, the continental shelf is virtually non-existant, and in other places it’s huge, like that between Alaska and Russia) and sunlight can penetrate down to the bottom still. The Epipelagic Zone is the whole of the lit regions of the ocean, so the Neritic Zone is inside the Epipelagic, and together these are Photic (Light) Zones. Everything else is Aphotic. As you can imagine, most life in the oceans lives in the Photic/Epipelagic Zones, because this is the only region with enough light for photosynthesis by the ocean’s plant life, either algae, phytoplankton, seagrasses, etcl. However, this isn’t to say the Aphotic zone is devoid of life - lots of animals like whales, sharks, and swordfish, visit the Aphotic zones to feed, and plenty of fish, crustaceans, and octopuses, like our little umbrella octopus today, live here permanently. 

Oceanic Layers and Gods

The Sunlight Zone: Sedna

The Twilight Zone: Poseidon

The Abyssal Zone: Ran