Farting Fish by Jenn Conyers. Photos by Jenn Conyers.
Did you know fish fart? As they go deeper in the water, the pressure forces the gases out of their system aka a fart. These gas bubbles can actually be detected by acoustics and help to identify certain types of fish. Pressure increases one atmosphere roughly every ten meters.
Yesterday as a pressure experiment, we decorated styrofoam cups and placed them inside of a mesh bag. Then attached the bag to the CTD, and we did a deep water CTD cast to about 2,100 meters. While under pressure, the air in the styrofoam cup was forced out which made the cups shrink drastically in size. Seen in the picture below are some of the cups after they came up compared to a cup that hadn’t been compressed.
This process of shrinking styrofoam cups is a long standing maritime tradition. Jen, the ADEON Lead PI, has around a dozen of these cups from all of her deep-water research cruises that she has been on. Even many of the ship’s crew have a few of these shrunken cups. This is primarily done with deep-water research since it takes over 1,000 meters to crush the cups.
