Quote Originally Posted by Witis View Post
That's the fun of it, trying to work out all the strengths and weaknesses in an objective manner and then determining which strategies currently dominate. It doesn't have to be the most physically endowed it could also be the most intelligent or the best all rounder.Nonetheless they are all oceanic creatures and water is their element by definition. To me it doesn't matter if they only live in reefs, or only in tropical or artic environments, what I am looking for is a creature's capacity to make it as the world's best oceanic predator.
That's utter nonsense. The ocean is filled with microenvironments. Take an animal out of the area that it is capable of living in, and the toughest predator will become....dead. Every animal in the ocean has parts of the ocean where it would die swiftly. That means that there are parts of the ocean where it would be largely nonfunctional, though not explicitly dead. For example, there is an invasive cichlid in south Florida that I did a little work with. Where it was living, it would fight with pretty much anything, even predators many times its size, for food. In a fish tank, the cichlid would attack anything it could identify as being alive, and thereby killed most other fish we put in a tank with it. However, a cold front came through and dropped the temperature into the 50s...and the cichlids died by the thousands. In fact, they are so sensitive to temperature changes that they will never spread further north out of south Florida, as they can't handle the occasional cold snaps.

Currently, I work with Salmon. Put a Chinook down in the same water with that cichlid, and one of the two would be dead very soon, though there would be no competition. Water cold enough for the Chinook would be lethal to the cichlid, whereas water warm enough for the cichlid would kill a Chinook in seconds. Therefore, each has certain requirements that it can't live without. You recognize that water is one of those requirements, as you are not attempting to say whether a lion is tougher than a shark, yet you fail to recognize that two different regions of water are as sharp a division as water is to air. In both cases, only organisms adapted to live in that environment CAN live in that environment. Saying that a lethal zone of the ocean is somehow a lesser distinction than any other lethal habitat simply because it is still wet, is a sophmoric argument. Dead is dead, and an organism that is not in an environment where it can survive is just as dead in one such environment as another.