Miners can't demand anything from the market when it comes to the price, unless they themselves are heavily involved into artificially keeping the price at certain levels to keep their operations profitable. If the price sinks down to levels that pools can't have their hardware running in a profitable manner, they either temporarily shut down their operations, or keep mining and use the buffers that they have been building up in a profitable situation to cover current losses. The latter example is the most likely one as shutting down hardware is some sort of a last resort action. If the pool in question is covering a decent amount of the total network hash power, then shutting down will result in the difficulty to drop, and potentially have other pools put more hardware to work in order to benefit from the decrease in difficulty. And that will result in the difficulty to climb up again.