Big things live in the ocean. Big, scary things.

Macrocheira kaempferi

Image via Wikipedia

BBC News reports that the

Prehistoric seas were filled with giant
plankton-eating fish which died out at the same time as the dinosaurs,
new fossil evidence suggests.

Scientists from Glasgow, Oxford
and the United States have identified fossil evidence which shows the
fish existed between 66 and 172 million years ago.

It also reports that

A Japanese spider crab believed to be the biggest
ever seen in Britain is set to go on show at Birmingham’s National Sea
Life Centre.

Dubbed Crabzilla, his front feeding limbs are
more than 5ft (1.5m) long and end in big claws.

In the meantime, the Open_Sailing project is trying to develop (via open source) solutions to enable humans to inhabit the oceans. From their website:

We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and
sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much
more.

I’m not so sure that I’d be eager to live in the ocean, given its other denizens. The Open_Sailing project sounds fascinating anyhow, though – they’re developing, among other things, “an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the
weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself” and “a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea.” Check out their concept video below:

Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept on Vimeo.

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