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
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.
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