Unsolved mysteries of the ocean
The ocean is a mysterious, mysterious element. Almost 3/4 of the earth's surface is covered by the ocean, 97% of which is more than 200 m deep, and for the most part this world has not been explored. The Ocean Abyss is in no rush to reveal its secrets, despite the fact that solo enthusiasts, marine biologists and oceanographers are constantly trying to learn more about the life of the ocean. For centuries, man has desperately strived into the depths, only in order to find out if there is anything living there at all.
To this day, people's knowledge of the ocean is negligible. If we collect all the grains of information that we have, it turns out that mankind knows much more about such distant worlds as the Moon and Mars. One famous explorer of the ocean depths lamented that the surface of the moon has more human footprints than the ocean floor. In the open ocean, encounters with very large animals sometimes occur. In recent years, science has recorded two such cases.
• 1976, November 15 - research vessel AFB-14 (USA) was docked near one Hawaiian island, having dropped two parachute trawls at a depth of 165 m. Suddenly, the ship began to drag to the side. It was understandable, they accidentally came across some large deep-sea animal. When the nets were lifted, a huge shark about 4.5 meters long and weighing 750 kg fought in one of the pouches. Her gigantic lips, flanking her wide-open mouth, were blueberry, and her jaws, which protruded forward, were shocking in their size. Shark was immediately given the nickname "megapast".
The mysterious animal was dragged aboard and brought ashore. Scientists who investigated it gave it a scientific name: Megachasma pelagios, which in Latin means “yawning mouth of the open ocean”. It was believed that the fish belonged to the type of slow-moving filter feeders, but, unlike whale and giant sharks, which plow the surface layers of water in search of plankton, the "megapast", as you can see, swims at great depths with open jaws all the time - through accumulations of deep-sea shrimps … They even came up with a story that shrimps themselves swim right into the womb of a predator, attracted by bioluminescent spots around the shark's mouth.
• 1984 November - Another animal with giant jaws was caught by a fishing boat near Catalina Island, near Los Angeles. Fortunately, the vessel was attended by a fisheries official, who guessed that the creature was of scientific value. The shark was taken to the local museum. It should be noted that, like the Hawaiian specimen, it was a male. Female sharks, as a rule, reach larger sizes, unlike males, therefore it is possible to make an assumption that much larger animals live in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
One scientist directly involved in the study of creatures with giant jaws, Leighton Taylor of the Waikik Aquarium, said: “The discovery of the giant jaws confirms the scientist's guess that there are objects … very large objects … living in the oceans that we know nothing about to this day. And this is amazing."
Nowhere, never even an assumption was expressed about the possibility of the existence of sea giants with such a huge mouth - neither in the reports of sailors, nor in folklore. No one came across such sea monsters in the oceans, and there were no intriguing stories from underwater video cameras.
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• 1915, July 30 - it happened in the North Atlantic. To the southwest of the island of Ireland, the German submarine I-28 torpedoed the British ship Aiberian. The vessel began to sink rapidly astern ahead and sank to the bottom. After about 25 sec. the sub's crew heard a loud explosion, and in the fountain of seawater and ship debris that flew into the air to a height of 100 feet (30 m), there was a "giant sea animal." The creature was 60 feet (18.3 m) long, shaped like a crocodile, with four limbs ending in webbed fins, it beat and squirmed on the surface for about 15 seconds, then went under the water.
• 1918, July 28 - another German submarine, I-109, was in the North Sea; At 10 p.m. the captain and another crew member noticed a creature 100 feet long (30 m) with jaws like a crocodile. The animal also had webbed limbs.
• As you can see, crocodile-like sea monsters are not uncommon. The captain of the steamer Grangens, flying between New York and the Brazilian port of Belém, near the mouth of the Amazon River, saw a creature with a head like a crocodile - it may have simply frolicked on the surface. In the jaws of the creature, it was possible to make out several rows of identical teeth 4-6 inches long (10-15 cm).
• In the late 1830s, the Royal British Navy ship Fly was on patrol in the Gulf of California. In the calm and transparent water, the captain unexpectedly saw "a large sea animal with the head and body of a crocodile", but "the limbs of the creature were two pairs of fins" - like a sea turtle. The creature was chasing another animal.
In recent decades, yachtsmen have ventured out to sea in much smaller vessels than in the old days. Those who cross the Atlantic in rowing boats and light single-seater yachts find themselves incomparably closer to the surface of the water and therefore can observe in detail what is happening under the surface of the water.
• English explorer and yachtsman John Ridgway is one of those who saw something unusual in the open ocean. Summer 1966 - they, together with another yachtsman - Chey Bliss, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a 6.1 m long rowing boat from Cape Cod to Ireland. The sides were only 18 inches (26 cm) high, so they were as close to the surface of the water as possible. One dark July night, when Blyth was asleep in the stern and Ridgway was alone in the oars, an extraordinary and rather spooky story happened. 20 years later, while preparing the famous program "The Mystery of the Giant Sea Serpent", he recalled, this time calmly and judiciously:
“As I remember, there was no moon; there is only a slight swell on the water. I sat facing the stern and, bent over, rowed with two oars. Having casually glanced towards the stern, I saw a luminous trail moving straight towards the boat.
I froze. It looked like a shell torpedoing a ship. For a moment I thought: something is going to hit the boat, but 'it' went under the bottom and came out from the other side, hiding in the darkness with a hissing sound."
• In his book Battle for Fortune, Ridgway gave a more colorful description:
“From the whistling sound at the starboard side, goose bumps went down my spine, and sleep vanished like a hand. Looking overboard, I saw the writhing or revolving outline of a huge creature. Its shape was clearly visible due to the phosphorescent glow, as if there were chains of neon lights on the creature.
The animal was gigantic in size: 35 feet (11 m) or more in length. It was heading for me and disappeared right under me, under the bottom of the boat … Making an effort over himself, looked over the starboard side. I didn't see anything, but after a few seconds there was a strong splash. I think it could have been the head of a monster that went abruptly under the water after it emerged to look at us."
• Another mysterious fish - the so-called "bone fish" - which was constantly caught by fishermen in the Comoros, although biologists believed that it became extinct, along with the entire type to which it belonged, about 70 million years ago. We are talking about cellocants. Another name for this fish is coelacanth.
An unusual bluish-gray fish with white spots up to 1.5 meters in length was caught with a net at a depth of 70 m, approximately 5 km from the village of Chalumna Point, at the mouth of the Chalumna River, southwest of East London in South Africa. This took place in 1938. The specimen was found by Hendrik Goosen from the deep-sea trawler Algoa-Bay. Gusen noticed that the fish was absolutely extraordinary, and did everything in his power to preserve and deliver the caught specimen to the shore. There was an aquarium on board the trawler, but the fish did not fit into it: the length was about 1.5 m, and it weighed 57.6 kg. Goossen put the fish on ice.
He immediately sent a radio message to his superiors - the Irwin & Johnson office - asking them to notify the local museum, which he did. Miss Courtenay Latimer, the first staff member of the East London Museum, once approached local fishermen to help create a collection of fish in the museum. She herself often went to the fish market when the fishing boats returned to the shore.
Approaching the glacier, she found several sharks and a large blue scale fish there. Such a fish has never been seen by anyone from the team. The woman took the fish to the museum by taxi. The chairman of the board of trustees was not happy with the find and said that it was "a freak and nothing else." He also laughed at Miss Latimer. But the persistent woman, confident that she had something completely unusual and very important at her disposal, was convinced that it was necessary to keep the copy. The animal was first preserved in formalin (it had already begun to swell from the hot air), and then one of the local stuffers made a museum exhibit out of the fish, in truth, rather bad.
Miss Latimer reviewed all of her books and came to the conclusion that this animal "looks most like a lungfish, only a little strange." Fueled by enthusiasm and intrigued that she had not found the fish in any reference book or textbook, she made several drawings of the creature and sent them with a letter to the most respected ichthyologist, Professor Smith of Rhodes University. The scientist for some reason hesitated to answer, and in the meantime the internal organs of the fish, which had not absorbed formalin, began to deteriorate, and they were forced to be thrown away. Finally, a telegram came with a request to save the skeleton and entrails. When he finally arrived in East London and examined the fish, he immediately realized (although he was very upset to see how barbarous it was treated) that it was a unique find. “I always hoped,” he said, “that somewhere,somehow a primitive fish of this type had to appear."
This creature looked almost entirely like a fish that swam in the seas between 350 and 70 million years ago. It was a new fossil! Gusen is said to have been permanently scarred by the strike of a strange fish, and said, "I am the only human being to have suffered from the fossil." Smith is credited with saying: "I would hardly be more surprised if I met a dinosaur on the street." The scientific world, meanwhile, gave the new creature the name Latimeria chalumnae, but Smith suggested calling the fish "the ancient four-footed."
The first live fish was caught on December 22, 1938, the second - 14 years later - on December 24, 1952; this fish was pulled by a fishing line from a depth of 200 meters near Anjuan, one of the Comoros in the Mozambique Channel. After the first find, Smith surveyed the entire east coast of Africa in search of another specimen. He passed out the description of the fish everywhere, putting up posters, offering a $ 100 reward. One can imagine what his joy was when he was notified of the capture of the second copy.
Smith appealed to the South African government to help get to the Comoros as quickly as possible, and then Prime Minister Dr. Malan personally ordered the Air Force to help Smith retrieve the fish and get it to the university as quickly as possible. The islands were French territory at the time, and the French authorities were so annoyed that Smith flew in, took the fish and fled without even saying goodbye that they banned him from entering the islands. After that, about 135 specimens were caught.
The discovery of living colecants indicates that these specific representatives of the living world have hardly changed over several million years.
The mini-sub "Geo" has carried out 40 dives at 30 different points along the entire coastal perimeter of the island of Grande Comore, as well as off the northern coast of Anjuan. On January 17th at 9 pm, the team discovered a colecant. They were the first to observe fish in natural habitat. In total, six coelocants were counted, approximately 120 to 180 cm long. The observation site was located 2 km from the coastline of the Grande Comore Island. Two fish "sat" on the bottom, the other four slowly swam nearby.
Until now, it was believed that lobulated paired pelvic and pectoral fins were used for crawling along the bottom, in the manner of some early amphibians. It turned out that this is not the case. It turned out that the fish does not use them as a "chassis" - it simply flops on its belly, keeping the fins sticking out to the sides. To swim forward, the fish rakes in paired fins, like a swimmer swimming in a crawl, with the only difference that the fins move like the limbs of a lizard or a horse: the front left fin of the fish moves together with the rear right, and vice versa.
The celokant skillfully uses the vertical currents of water, using fins as wings - to maintain balance in the water. Thus, although no one has seen how this fish "walks", the work of the fins described above could have contributed to the transition to locomotion on land several million years ago. The cellocant, of course, is not an intermediate evolutionary link between fish and terrestrial vertebrates, but, undoubtedly, its features are present in it.
M. Bright