Shadowing Practice: Why Do Deep Oceans Have So Many Giants? - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Let's imagine you're trapped in a glass box sinking down to the bottom of the ocean.
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You might think all you'd see a tiny fish, or at worst, something like an anglerfish.
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But what you'd actually find is much, much bigger.
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Sharks become bigger than great whites, squids are now heavier than cars, and even the once ordinary looking insects are now just extraordinarily gigantic.
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Welcome to the messed up world of deep sea gigantism, exists in the bottom of the ocean.
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But while you'd expect in a place with zero sunlight and almost no food that animals would shrink down to save energy, instead, the ocean does the exact opposite.
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Everything in deep water turns into some oversized version of themselves, turning the small creatures big and the big creatures giant.
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So what's actually in the water that's causing these creatures to turn into monsters?
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I'm sorry.
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Well, to understand why deep sea gigantism exists, let's take a look at what's probably the most terrifying example of it: the big fin squid.
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And if you couldn't tell, this squid has very oddly big fins.
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Relative to their mantle size, their fins are stretched out way longer than normal, and can even make the body wider than it is tall, something you don't really see in any other squid.
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But most of their actual size isn't even their body, it's these elbows.
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limbs that look like bent arms, but they're permanently bent into place.
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Compare these to the tentacles of a normal shallow water squid, and you'll pretty easily see something's happened to morph these guys into something different.
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So, what was it in the deep ocean that forced them to evolve into these massive, spindly giants?
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Well, 15 ,000 feet down, you can't exactly go around sprinting after prey.
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There's almost no food, and every movement costs precious energy.
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Instead of hunting, it just drifts, letting those 20 -foot -long filaments hang in the dark like a massive net.
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It covers as much area as possible while doing almost zero work.
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In reality, while they're unsettling and I would definitely never want one to touch me, most of their size is dangly arms that would never actually be able to hurt you.
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There's barely any muscle in those arms, and we have no real evidence that these squids are dangerous towards humans. Yet.
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Almost every big fin we've ever caught has actually just been a juvenile.
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are already stretching out to 20 feet, we have no idea how much larger the full -grown adults might get.
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They're relatively hard to study because they live thousands of meters below the surface, and most that we've found have actually just been by accident.
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They're big, but the ocean is even bigger, so they're incredibly rare.
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But wait, if the only reason to get big in the deep was to turn yourself into a giant fishing net, then every animal down there would just look like a bunch of floating string.
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But they don't.
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Gigantism isn't just one hack for finding food.
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It's a response to a much bigger problem.
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Survival in a place that is actively trying to starve you to death.
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Some animals didn't just grow long arms, they grow an entirely massive frame.
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Take a look at this.
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This isn't a squid or a worm.
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This is the oarfish.
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bony fish in the entire ocean
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and it's one of the most blatant examples of gigantism that has absolutely nothing to do with nets.
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A full -grown oarfish can stretch out to over 36 feet long, which, to put that in perspective, is longer than three cars parked bumper to bumper, made entirely of fish.
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For centuries, sailors who caught a glimpse of these things at the surface thought they were literal sea serpents and honestly, looking at them, I don't really blame them.
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They have these and a body that's really, really long.
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They aren't just stringy either.
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These creatures genuinely weigh over 600 pounds.
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But what was it about their environment that forced them to stretch out and become this big, instead of, well, this big, like any other normal bony fish?
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They aren't using their body to snag prey like the bigfin squid does.
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Instead, they use their massive size to become a giant antenna.
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Awefish have been observed hanging By being 30 feet long and vertical,
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they can scan different layers of the ocean at the exact same time.
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Think about it.
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At the bottom of the ocean, food doesn't move horizontally.
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It falls from above.
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By being incredibly long, the oarfish can detect pressure changes
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or chemical signals from prey that might have been 10 feet above its head
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or 10 feet below its tail without moving a single muscle.
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They're a living biological sensor that covers as much vertical ground as possible.
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But if being a giant antenna or living net is so great, why aren't all the ocean? all fish at the surface also doing it?
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Well, it's because the deep sea removed the one thing that keeps most animals small: competition.
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On a coral reef, you're a slow, 30 -foot -long ribbon of meat.
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A shark or an orca is going to have the easiest lunch of its life.
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On the surface, being big and slow is a death sentence because there is always something faster and hungrier than you.
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You're forced to stay small just so you can hide or stay fast just so you can escape.
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But in the deep, who are you running from?
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The abyss is remarkable.
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There aren't massive schools of predators patrolling the darkness.
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For an awl fish or a bigfin squid, there is almost zero evolutionary pressure to be fast.
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Once you reach a certain size, you are effectively too big for the few predators down there to even bother with.
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Without anyone to hunt them, these animals were free to stop wasting energy on speed and start focusing entirely on efficiency.
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And that's the real secret to deep sea gigantism.
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Larger bodies are actually just better at not dying of hunger.
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It sounds counterintuitive, but it's not just a big thing but a larger body allows for a much slower metabolism.
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It's a biological paradox.
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Being bigger actually costs less energy per pound of animal.
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A tiny fish has a high metabolism and can starve to death in days if it doesn't find a meal.
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But these giants are built like massive biological batteries.
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They can store massive amounts of nutrients and then just wait.
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Their hearts beat slower, their muscles move less, and they can go months between meals because their bodies are designed to endure, not to sprint.
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Yes, but gentle giants.
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Well, not always.
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This is the giant squid, and unlike the oarfish or the bigfin, there is absolutely nothing gentle about this giant.
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These creatures can stretch up to 45 feet long and weigh nearly half a ton, and they don't just feed on plankton or tiny shrimp.
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It has the largest eyes in the entire animal kingdom, literally the size of dinner plates designed to catch the tiniest glimmers of light in the pitch black.
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the giant squid had to weaponize its entire body.
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It uses two massive feeding tentacles, like biological grappling hooks, to snatch fish out of the dock.
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Each sucker on the tentacle is lined with a ring of sharp, serrated teeth made of chitin, designed to dig into flesh so the prey can't slip away.
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Once it has a grip, it drags the victim towards its center, where it eats them with a beak harder than bone that could chomp a turtle in half.
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These creatures are not gentle.
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giants instead of just passive drifter giants.
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Well, while the abyss is mostly empty, it's not entirely empty.
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And if you're going to hunt things that can actually fight back, you can't afford to be a living net.
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You have to be a weapon.
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But the biggest reason they had to get so massive wasn't just to catch food.
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It's because they're one of the only deep sea creatures that actually has a rival.
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Sperm whales.
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Whales will dive thousands of feet into the darkness specifically to find and eat these squids.
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They created a literal biological arms race that has been going on for millions of years.
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To survive, the squids were forced to grow larger to fight back, developing thicker mantles and more powerful beaks to try and fend off a multi -ton mammal.
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When we find sperm whales with massive circular scars all over their faces, those aren't accidents.
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Those are the marks of a battle that happened in total darkness, miles below the surface.
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It's a completely different side of deep -sea gigantism.
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Instead of with a surface animal that's been terrorizing them for millenniums.
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But if the deep sea is a place of crushing, bone breaking pressure, wouldn't being a giant be the worst possible move?
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You'd think a massive body would just be squeezed instantly and pop under all the stress.
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But that's actually one of the biggest misconceptions about the deep ocean.
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Pressure doesn't crush you if you're made of the same stuff as the water around you.
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These animals are mostly water and oil, and since liquids don't compress, the pressure inside their cells is the same as pressure outside.
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They're essentially a part of the deep ocean part of the ocean instead of resisting it.
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In fact, the deep sea is actually the easiest place on Earth to be a giant.
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See, on land, your biggest enemy isn't pressure, it's gravity.
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Gravity is a constant tax on your skeleton.
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The bigger you get, the more energy you have to waste just standing up.
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If an earthworm tried to grow to 40 feet long, it would literally be crushed by its own weight before it could even move.
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But in the water, buoyancy deletes that tax.
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Because the water supports their mass, these animals have total structural freedom.
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This is why soft -bodied giants are so common down there.
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But you don't see many rigid skeleton ones.
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They don't need heavy bones to stay upright.
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They can grow massive, grotesquely large frames that would be physically impossible on land, using almost zero energy to maintain them.
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But this doesn't mean it's completely impossible for hard -shelled animals to experience deep -sea gigantism.
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Look at the giant isopod.
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If you've ever flipped over a log and seen a pill bug or a roly -poly, you're looking at a distant cousin of this thing.
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And while giant isopods can't grow to the size of actual giants like the giant squids, compared to the insects on land, they're absolutely massive.
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In fact, if you look at the scale of gigantism, the isopod might actually be the most extreme case on the list.
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A normal squid is maybe a foot or two long and weighs a couple of pounds.
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A giant squid is 45 feet long and weighs 700 pounds.
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weighs almost nothing, maybe a tenth of a gram.
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A giant isopod can weigh nearly 4 pounds, that's a 20 ,000 times increase in mass.
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Proportionally, that is like a house cat evolving into a creature the size of a blue whale.
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Japanese spider crabs as well can grow bigger than the length of two of you combined, assuming you're not 7 feet tall.
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And they have hard shells as well.
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And for anyone who saw our video on crab evolution, these guys are actually still true crabs, Here's the weird part.
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Unlike a giant squid, which would collapse instantly at the surface, giant isopods and Japanese spider crabs can actually survive the pressure up here just fine.
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You can just stick them in a tank and they'll be okay.
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So, if they can live up here, why did they only become giants in the deep?
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Well, again, there's so many other factors to deep sea gigantism besides just pressure.
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You need specific conditions to allow yourself to become gigantic.
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In the abyss, you can go years with a giant giant without seeing a single scrap of food.
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But when something like a dead whale sinks to the bottom, you need to munch and store up for the next decade.
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To survive, the isopod had to evolve to become the ultimate biological storage container.
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By being massive, they can fit a staggering amount of food into their bodies at once.
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They can gorge themselves until they're physically distorted, eating enough in one sitting to stay alive for years.
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There are actually records of these guys in captivity going five entire years without a single meal.
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like their garden cousins, they'd never be able to store enough energy to survive the wait between meals.
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Because they could be waiting until they die.
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It's odd, but the less food there is, the bigger the animals will get.
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And because the water is so cold, the metabolism of these animals is dialed down to almost zero.
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They aren't burning energy just to exist, which means their cells aren't wearing out like ours do.
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And when you aren't burning through your own body just to stay alive, you end up living for a long, long time.
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overlooked parts of deep sea gigantism: time.
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A normal pill bug in your yard might live for two or three years before it hits its limit.
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But a giant isopod can live for decades, which just gives it more time to grow.
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You're not necessarily a giant because of a single mutation, you're a giant because you've had centuries to just...
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keep growing.
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Size is basically a side effect of not dying, and nowhere is this time factor more obvious than in this guy, the Greenland shark.
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But the great white is the king of sharks, and while they're definitely faster and more aggressive, the Greenland shark will eventually dwarf them.
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It just takes a while.
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They can reach lengths of over 24 feet, making them one of the largest sharks in the entire world.
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But they aren't big because they're strong or active predators.
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They're big because they're practically immortal.
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These sharks grow at a rate of only about 1 .5 centimeters per year.
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Think about how slow that is.
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For a Greenland shark to reach 20 feet long, it has to be alive for centuries.
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Scientists have found individuals that are estimated to be around 400 years old,
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which means there are sharks swimming in the deep today that were born before the industrial revolution even started.
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They don't even reach sexual maturity, meaning they aren't even adults until they're about 150 years old.
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They still grow a bit even past that stage, and while 1 .5 centimeters a year doesn't sound like much, stack that up over 300 years, that's already 15 feet.
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However, despite how cool deep sea gigantism is, I would like to clarify
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that the deep isn't actually just a straight chaotic zone where every single thing is now a thousand times the size.
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A lot of people will play up this effect to make it sound like there's things larger than whales
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or that absolutely everything gets huge.
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But the real truth is that deep sea gigantism doesn't apply to everything in the deep.
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In fact, most things in the deep are still actually pretty small.
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Gigantism only rewards a select few builds
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that only will be able to get the deep work if your biology can handle the trade -offs.
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You don't just instantly become big by going deep, you're forced to become big when your build wouldn't work otherwise.
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The giant build only really makes sense for a few specific types of animals: the scavengers who need to store food, the ambush predators who don't want to move,
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and the biological batteries who have zero competition.
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If you don't fit into one of these categories,
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staying small is actually the more aggressive reproduce faster,
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and live off the tiny crumbs that the giants miss.
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We see this in highly specialized niches, like certain deep -sea snails and crustaceans that have stayed microscopic for millions of years.
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They've been stripped down to the bare minimum, just enough muscle to move, and just enough brain to find a mate.
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They aren't failed giants.
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They are the ultimate survivors of the leanest environment on Earth.
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Even some fish have taken this to the extreme.
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Think about the The males of some species have undergone such intense miniaturization that they've lost the ability to even feed themselves.
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They've shrunk down until they're essentially just a tiny, swimming set of nostrils and fins, designed to find a female,
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attach to her, and stay small enough that they don't drain her energy.
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And in some places in the even deeper sea, in what scientists call biological deserts,
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the food supply is so incredibly low that the math for a giant body just doesn't add up.
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fish still needs a baseline amount of calories just to keep its heart beating and its cells alive.
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If there's genuinely only grams of food available, no matter how good your metabolism is, you can't survive.
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With all these factors together, deep sea gigantism isn't really a freak accident, but just an inevitability for creatures down there.
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You have buoyancy removing the weight of your own body, so you don't need to waste energy building a heavy skeleton.
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You have the cold or even centuries without wearing out.
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And because there are so few predators, there's nothing to stop you from reaching that endgame size.
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There is actually a big misconception that oxygen is what drives this, because it is true that higher oxygen will also cause animals to get bigger.
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Cells need oxygen, and if they can't get enough, then giant bodies will suffocate.
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But the deep sea isn't actually that oxygen rich.
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If you saw our video on the polar giants, gave birth to things like the colossal squid, which are even heavier than giant squids.
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It's suspected that they became even larger due to a combined effect of both polar and deep sea gigantism, which is how they're so ridiculously chunky.
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And while we think these giant creatures are freaks because they don't look like the fish we see at the beach, the truth is, the oceans at the surface are the weird and chaotic ones.
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There's way more violence, way more animals eating each other and injecting each other freaks of nature, just a different kind.
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Squids in the deep probably see squids at the surface and wonder, how did they get so freakishly tiny?
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Fortunately, if you're afraid of these giants, they won't be reaching you anytime soon because of how helpless they've become at the surface.
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They are perfectly designed for their world, and we are perfectly designed for ours.
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And by ours, I mean the local beach.
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I'm not going in any further past that.
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Thank you guys for watching and if you enjoyed this video, consider checking out our others, as well as our second channel which I'll link in the description.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
Practicing speaking English with the video "Why Do Deep Oceans Have So Many Giants?" offers a unique opportunity to engage with fascinating content about deep-sea gigantism. The subject matter is both captivating and educational, making it an excellent choice for IELTS speaking practice. As you shadow the speaker's delivery, you'll not only improve your pronunciation and fluency but also expand your vocabulary related to marine biology and environmental science. This context encourages learners to stick with the topic and discuss it confidently, which is crucial for speaking exams and conversations alike.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
- Conditional Sentences: The speaker uses hypothetical scenarios, such as, “If the only reason to get big in the deep was…” This structure helps to explore cause-and-effect relationships, essential for effective argumentation.
- Passive Voice: Phrases like “most have actually just been caught” show how the passive voice can effectively shift focus from the subject performing an action to the action itself.
- Descriptive Language: The speaker employs vivid descriptions, such as “long arms” and “giant antenna,” allowing learners to practice using adjectives and adverbs to create engaging narratives.
- Comparative Structures: The use of comparisons, such as “longer than three cars parked bumper to bumper,” provides learners with examples of how to articulate differences—a common requirement in speaking assessments.
Common Pronunciation Traps
As you learn English with YouTube and practice the shadowing technique, be mindful of certain pronunciation challenges in this video. For example:
- Gigantism - The stress is on the second syllable: gi-GAN-tism. Practice emphasizing the correct syllable to ensure clarity.
- Oarfish - The pronunciation may be tricky; ensure you pronounce it as OR-fish, with a clear 'r'.
- Observe - The 'r' in 'observe' can be soft; practice until it feels natural. Making sure your 'r' sounds are crisp can be a valuable component of your overall pronunciation skills.
By focusing on these aspects while watching the video, you will enhance your speaking abilities and become more comfortable discussing complex topics in English. Embrace the shadowspeak method, and watch your confidence soar!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've ever caught · we've found · have been observed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are stretched · have been observed · are built |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | anyone who saw · exist, which means · squid, which are |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.