Is it possible to eat underwater

How would they "fry" or "bake" things like fish without fire? Would they have to eat raw food only? The only usable thing that comes to my mind are underwater volcanoes, but they aren't that common. Besides, every family would have to have their own. Going to the surface for cooking doesn't seem convenient either. When I think of seafood-centred diets, the first people who come to mind are the Japanese, who are famous for eating fish raw.

If millions of land dwelling people are already eating raw fish, and have been for hundreds if not thousands of years, even with the technology and means of cooking it, then I don't think that it would be a stretch to assume that the mer-people would prepare and eat their food similarly.

What is interesting is that they are essentially a continuous system, so you could build your civilization of mer-people around these ridges as if they were roads or travel routes. Another option is to not have one culture of mer-people, but to make them as diverse as the people on the surface , the earth is covered by far more ocean than it is land, so you can create quite a large number of aqua-cultures.

You could have your ridge dwelling mer people that eat hydrothermally cooked food, your nomadic dolphin hunting tribes that follow pods of dolphins like the ancient North American plains people followed Buffalo, who either eat their meat raw, or cook it at the surface since dolphins live near the surface and in shallower waters anyways , and your sinister rift dwellers that live deep in the dark oceanic rifts and live off of pillaging other tribes.

Very interesting. Cooking was an important thing in our evolution. By essentially moving part of our digestive system outside our bodies, we lost chewing muscles and got more nourishment extraction with a smaller digestive system. Experiments show that people trying to live on raw food like chimps will give up, not finish their day's ration and get sore, tired jaws.

If something like that was formative to mer-folk evolution of tool use and sapience, note that the issue isn't heat or cooking as we normally understand it, but in offloading digestion and improving upon it. Besides fire, we also have cheese treatment by enzymes , fermentation , acids or other chemical reactions. Instead of a rumen inside their bodies, they might do essentially the same thing in a jar.

They might evolve to live off particular microorganisms and the broken down tissue it leaves behind after some period of action. Imagine if a cow did not have to cart around however many gallons of culture nor expend personal time and effort into chewing its cud. It could lose all that anatomy and energy expenditure from its phenotype. Finding suitable processes e. Their manner of feeding might be utterly different than ours.

But, it had an important role in evolving complex tool use and community cooperation. If they don't produce milk not mammals as discussed on the fortification thread but regurgitate food to feed the young, it would be obvious to domesticate animals that can eat other food sources and get them to regurgitate after breaking it down.

Those would evolve into livestock that's built for that purpose and possibly rather different from the wild ancestor. If the original species also feeds its young in this way, it evolves into one that produces crop-milk in bulk, with a similar idea to how dairy cows exaggerate the mechanism already present for feeding others of the same species.

We cook food in order to soften it, to break it down, to make the nutrients more readily available to us and to change the taste. There are other ways to achieve these goals that don't require heat. We make use of micro-organisms to process food, for example yogurt, cheese, beer and bread. Simple decay will do the same job.

Pickled products will slowly break down over time, changing the taste. Stomach acid would do the trick, or concentrated salt water. Perhaps products could be prepared inside a skin bag or fish bladder to prevent them from dissolving in the sea water. They might use hydrothermal vents. By going deep underwater your merfolk might be able to find zones where the magma seeps from the core heating the water around it, or they might dig a little near the bottom to force the magma out at specific places.

It might not be ideal for frying, and you might want to protect your chefs and food from some noxious chemicals, but the heat it provides might be what you need to at least create some sort of oven.

Humans tend to live by shorelines, and make extensive use of the sea, why would merpeople not do the same in reverse? It would make sense for merpeople to live close to the shore, at which point they can do things like:.

Why risk death in extreme pressures hunting for thermal vents, or volcanic regions, or eat things raw, when you can cook them on the nearest beach with stone age tools?

It is perfectly simple to create a fire underwater. Nevertheless, any single feeding event will only follow one feeding strategy at a time: after all, a leopard seal cannot filter a penguin. The six strategies defined here naturally grade into each other, and together form a sequence that recalls the evolutionary transition of mammals back to the sea. Some species can cross the boundaries between strategies, but only when one strategy is derived from the next, like semi-aquatic from terrestrial, or suction from raptorial feeding.

Thus, for example, fur seals can switch between the semi-aquatic, raptorial and suction strategies when targeting prey of different sizes. Being able to read evolutionary history from the feeding behaviour of living mammals allows us to explain and make predictions about how the fossil ancestors of these modern species may have behaved.

For example, we might predict that modern baleen whales must have evolved from raptorial ancestors via a suction-feeding intermediate. So imagine again a dog, struggling with the ball in the water. The same process happened for real at least three times in the evolutionary history of mammals.

Who knows where it might go next — suction-feeding otters, anyone? Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. You need to be a member in order to leave a comment. Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Already have an account? Sign in here. Recommended Posts. Jantiz 4 Posted December 17, Posted December 17, Link to post Share on other sites. Jantiz 4 Posted December 18, Posted December 18, Recoil 2 Posted December 18, Jantiz 4 Posted December 30, Messages 16, Reaction score Location California Norte of dives - Well for me it started out with a 24 pack of beer coors light , then they went to the 30 pack, it was hard at first, but got easier.

I can't take it. Bo Danker Contributor. Messages Reaction score 0 Location Texas. Click to expand Jim Ernst Contributor. I hear the little Capri Sun pouches are easy enough to poke a hole in and drink UW.

Bo Danker said:. Bring a pony keg and tell everyone your diving doubles. Nomad Contributor. Messages Reaction score 2 Location Currently - Texas of dives - There was a structure where you could go down and look through the window into the springs.

They had a whole bunch of women dressed up like mermaids who would breathe air out of tubes. They would swim through rings, eat food, drink soda pop The place even had a swimming pig, named Ralph. What more could you possibly want? Nomad - sounds like Weeki Wachee Springs!