How do aquariums simulate the pressure of being deep underwater for deep-sea fish?

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If a fish lives 4000 or even 1000-2000 meters underwater, how do aquariums simulate the pressure of that without having the exhibit be actually that deep? Or are the fish able to adapt to the lower pressure environments?

In: Biology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are some ways of simulating increased water pressure without a massive water column. One would be to pressurize the vessel with compressed air. Air compresses nicely for this purpose and will create a similar force distribution to a column of water above the water line. There probably isn’t a need for simulating full depth pressure for most deep sea fish though so keeping them in a pressurized vessel when not necessary would be expensive.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There would also seem to be a small issue obtaining deep sea specimens, even if the aquarium was ready. You would need a portable version that can be brought into the depth, filled and then transported all the way to the final display, submerged and opened. Given the amount of pressure needed it would seem very unwieldy to have anything reasonably portable.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Until a 2012, there was no such thing. The Abyss Box in Brest (France) is, as far as I know, the only aquarium in the world designed to hold true deep sea marine life, at the pressures they are accustomed to 1,800 metres below the sea surface.

So how does the tank stay so pressurized? A system of pumps and valves maintains the pressure at the necessary 18 megapascals (180 atmospheres of pressure). High powered pumps push water into the tank, while steel encasings and valves keep the water inside. The glass of the one single 15 cm wide viewing window has to be 10 cm thick to withstand the immense pressure of the water inside. It only holds 16 litres of water.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not for aquarium use but still cool and related to the comments:
[Navy Experimental DivIng Unit (NEDU) Ocean Simulation Facility](https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/SUPSALV/NEDU/Facilities/)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Pressure is an issue and it would be a difficult obstacle to overcome just based on the materials and design of most aquariums. Another obstacle however is temperature, at the depths you are talking about the ocean is roughly 0 degrees celsius. For reference I have a 100 gallon salt water tank where the fish all need the water at 26 degrees celsius, granted they are all considered tropical. I have yet to see an aquarium chiller that can lower a tank temperature to 0, although that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Anonymous 0 Comments

To recreate the water pressure at 4000m deep in sea water you’d need a little over 6000 PSI and I doubt any viable man made machine can recreate that on an entire aquarium considering the pressure distribution. For a single square foot you’d need 432 tons of downward pressure. It’d have to be a fairly small tank.

[This one](https://www.hydraulicspneumatics.com/technologies/other-components/article/21883176/huge-hydraulic-press-goes-to-work-in-california) weighs 2650t itself, is 60” tall, and can put out 40,000t. Mathematically (I have no idea how you could even pull this off logistically) the aquarium would have a maximum flat surface area of 92.6sqft. Pretty tiny. That’s a 9.6”x9.6” room.

Not even going to touch in the materials used for piping or holding the tank. I’d suggest looking into bathyscaphes to get an idea of what the construction could possibly look like. I’m no authority on math but that’s just an idea.

Edit: Another point: I read an article about a specific tank for whales. “A large public aquarium, like the one pictured in Okinawa, Japan, can contain 7.5 million litres. That’s more than 7,500 tonnes of water, held back by a single window 22.5m across.” The window is made from polymethylmethacrylate. A type of plastic.

The lesson here is that there’s a reason we don’t have deep sea fish in aquariums. Nature is just too extreme.