Picture a fish. No matter what type you picked, you probably imagined a colorful scaled creature with fins, gills, and puckered lips (or maybe a toothy open jaw if you went in the shark direction). A lot of the fish we think of as particularly “fishy” have one thing in common: They come from just a tiny portion of the ocean. By some estimates, humans have explored only a fifth of Earth’s seas, which cover the majority of the planet. The fish that we’re familiar with are just a small sample of the diversity of life underwater. Three new species of fish, discovered by a massive team of researchers exploring the Atacama trench, highlight that diversity. The blue, pink, and purple Atacama snailfish (a temporary name) were caught by a camera that had been submerged, with bait, to some 26,000 feet (about 8,000 meters). The snailfish’s blobby, translucent bodies look like ghostly tadpoles, and they appear to have very few bones. A report on the fish was presented at this week’s 2018 Challenger Conference, which is focused on marine biology and held at Newcastle University in the UK. Based on the 400 or so known species of snailfish, the team was able to identify their discovery as part of that family, also known as sea snails or lumpsuckers for their feeding style. A cousin of the Atacama snailfish, the Marianas snailfish, is the deepest-dwelling fish ever discovered, inhabiting depths below 26,600 ft. Because their habitat is in the deepest trenches of the ocean, Atacama snailfish live without the fear of predation; five miles is an awfully deep dive for a meal. They have also adapted beautifully to their environment. “The hardest structures in their bodies are the bones in their inner ear, which give them balance, and their teeth,” Thomas Linley, a marine biologist at Newcastle, said in a statement. Otherwise, the fish are made of a gooey substance that relies on the crushing pressure of the deep ocean—some 2,500 times what we land-dwellers are used to, according to Smithsonian—to hold their bodies together. Unfortunately, these evolutionary lifehacks come with a price: When brought to the surface, the snailfish “melted” apart. Researchers were able to preserve one, which is currently being studied further, but the effort of retrieving and storing these fish means they will likely never be as understood as more easily accessible animals, like those that live near the surface of the ocean or on land. https://qz.com/1387690/a-new-fish-found-26000-feet-deep-melts-at-the-surface-of-the-sea/
video embedded in link showed a whole range of critters showing up for the bait. shrimps and whatever the spider/crab thing were cool too.
used to bring up a gelatinous bodied fish when trawling in 380-420 fathoms off of oregon. never bothered to ask folks at OSU what it was. wonder if it was related. same body shape and semi transluscent. about a foot long and same shaped mouth. wondering if related. didn't fall apart at surface though...
did catch a giant squid that we brought in. first recorded landing in oregon and OSU came down for it to study.
Been learning all about the "blobfish" all week, which has a similar issue with the lack of pressure at the surface. In 2013, the society for preservation of ugly animals named it the world's ugliest animal and adopted it as their mascot.
One time, while visiting Hawaii with my (then) girlfriend and best friend, my girlfriend caught crabs while swimming in Hawaii. Come to think of it, so did my friend.
You have line that will reach that deep? I'm estimating about 2,400 feet deep. We've got mountains shorter than that.
winches on the one boat i ran held 1000 fathoms of 5/8" cable wire. in that depth i would tow the trawl at 1.6-1.8 knots and the scope of the warps we would set out to tow in that depth and speed would be at about 1.5 : 1 + 50. so we would set 650 fathoms of wire to maintain our depth. the target species was part of the deep water complex quota, in particular large black cod and thorny headed rockfish.
