Is it possible for supergiant creatures to exist in the deep sea?

When life began to appear on Earth about 3.6 billion years ago, all living organisms were small, and it took almost 2.5 billion years to evolve organisms larger than a single cell.

After the emergence of multicellular organisms, the rate of biological evolution began to accelerate, and animals tended to become larger as their body sizes diversified enormously. By the time of the dinosaurs, it seems that creatures were becoming plus-sized, but after that, they seem to have started getting smaller again.

It is important to note here that the largest animal ever found is now the blue whale, which has been swimming in the world's oceans for only a few million years.

This tendency to grow larger during evolution is known as Cope's Law, named after the American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope.

Many people may not have even heard of this Cope's Law because it is too controversial and there are too many opposing voices, but it does seem to be true that creatures are getting bigger.

In 2015, a study published in the journal Science showed that since the Cambrian period 5.42 years ago, the average and maximum size of marine organisms have increased dramatically, while the minimum size has remained fairly constant.

To some extent, it was inevitable that organisms would grow larger, and if vertebrates are more "advanced," then the smallest vertebrate must be larger than the smallest invertebrate because it requires an organism of a certain size to encapsulate it all.

Likewise, warm-blooded marine animals like whales can only avoid hypothermia if they are more than a meter long.

Thus, when the ancestors of today's marine mammals invaded the ocean again, they had already set a new hard target for the minimum body size of this group, which in turn must have affected the average size of the whole group.

So in general, marine life has evolved very much by Cope's Law, and will only continue to trend towards larger.

So does this mean that marine life is inexorably getting bigger and bigger until the oceans are full of behemoths?

Will we enter the age of giants?

The answer is no way!

First of all, the minimum size has not changed. It has been some time since evolution to ecology, and most species are very small, and not many become giants, just as 75% of animals are now insects.

This situation of more small species is especially evident in the oceans because marine food webs usually have a highly size-dependent structure, which simply means that big fish eat small fish and small fish eat shrimp.

It takes a large number of small fish to meet the energy needs of a large fish, so the only way these food webs can work is if the number of small fish far exceeds the number of large fish.

Second, most of the overall increase in body size of all marine animals has resulted from the evolution of major new populations, which means that all the anatomical and physiological innovations are needed.

There is little incentive to become larger in any existing species.

The blue whale, for example, could not have been as large as it is on land because the earth's gravity would limit the creature's size, while ocean buoyancy gives it the incentive to get bigger, but then food would limit its size, and bigger would mean eating more.

In fact, given the physical and physiological limitations, many ocean giants have pretty much reached the limit of what they can achieve.

Pictured: Bigger marine life means new species and new food

Right now, for most groups of marine animals that we know of, it's unlikely that there will be significantly larger members shortly, or that we'll see larger blue whales or squid.

But there is the possibility of some new behemoth whose blueprint we don't yet know.

But could it exist in the deep sea? After all, so many of the sea monsters caught are from the deep!

It's hard to say, I can only guess that it may live in shallow waters like the blue whale and will enter deeper waters to feed.

Food in the deep sea is limited, and many times may have to rely on the leftovers that fall from above, which is hardly enough to satisfy the needs of large creatures. If there is such a large creature, it has no reason to let itself stay below, and give up more food, more convenient to hunt in the shallow sea.

But the deep sea also has conditions that create large creatures, such as colder temperatures, which can reduce their metabolism, and the preference for food can be greatly reduced.

Perhaps, like Godzilla such creatures beyond our understanding of real existence are not unlikely.

One more interesting fact is that human activity has affected Koop's Law of marine animals. As a species, we are very effective at repelling larger animals wherever we go.

Faced with fishing pressure and other anthropogenic threats, individuals in many populations may not reach their maximum age or size before we eat them.

Many studies have shown that our rule of catching the big and leaving the small has made much fish in the ocean smaller.