By Susan Gaidos
When you think about life’s pressures weighing down on you, consider the plight of Palaemonetes varians — the Atlantic ditch shrimp.
Smaller than a finger, and covered with only a thin shell, the translucent creature flourishes in the warm, shallow waters off the coast of northern Europe. Recently, though, scientists at the University of Southampton in England have plucked dozens of the critters from their homes and carried them to the lab, placing them in reinforced containers that replicate the crushing pressures found more than three kilometers beneath the sea’s surface. Here, where the strain of the water can squash a human’s rib cage, the shrimps survive quite happily. When the pressure’s on, this animal can sink and swim.
Scientists are subjecting the shrimps to these extreme conditions to better understand the mechanisms that allow some marine animals to adjust to life in the deep sea. Other teams are traveling to the deepest parts of the ocean — where pressure can reach more than 16,000 pounds per square inch — to study the biology of creatures that already thrive when tremendous weight bears down on them.