The deepest live fish ever captured – and captured on camera – is miles below the surface of the North Pacific Ocean.
In complete darkness except for the light shone on the bottom of a deep-sea trench by researchers using an autonomous deep-ocean vessel, an unknown snailfish species was recorded at a bone-crushing depth of 27,349 feet (8,336 meters).
The snailfish—of the genus Pseudoliparis, which resembles a large, terrifying tadpole—was a small juvenile with greater capabilities to live at such depths than other deep-sea fish. It was found in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench in southern Japan during a two-month expedition by a joint Australian-Japanese scientific expedition.
The discovery was part of a decade-long study of the world’s deepest fish populations conducted by the University of Western Australia and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology.
We have spent over 15 years researching these deep snail fish; Alan Jamieson, director of the Mindero Center for Deep Sea Research, said Monday statement.
Days after photographing the fish, the team collected two snailfish (Pseudoliparis belyaevi) in traps 26,319 feet (8,022 meters) deep in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench.
In the gorgeous footage released Sunday, a number of transparent, scaleless fish with wing-like fins and eel-like tails can be seen swimming in a black abyss, illuminated by a spotlight from a baited camera. It was not immediately clear how large the fish were.
“In other trenches like the Mariana Trench, we’ve found them at increasingly deeper depths just creeping over the 8,000-meter mark in smaller and smaller numbers, but they’re already all over Japan,” Jamieson said.
This snailfish was the first fish to be collected from depths over 26,247 feet (8,000 metres), statement He said. She added that in previous missions, snailfish were seen at a depth of 25,272 feet (7,703 meters) in 2008.
The expedition began last September to explore the deep trenches around Japan in the North Pacific.
The discovery of the mysterious deep-sea creature breaks a record previously held by a snailfish detected in the Mariana Trench, the planet’s deepest point in the Pacific Ocean: one in 2017 at 26,831 feet (8,178 meters), surpassing the previous record by more than 518 feet. . and another in 2014 of a snail fish photographed at a depth of 26,716 feet (8,143 meters) by an expedition team led by marine scientists at the University of Hawaii.
“We tell people from a very early age, as young as two or three years old, that the deep sea is a scary, horrible place that you shouldn’t go to, and that grows with time,” Jamieson told Reuters.
He added, “We don’t appreciate the fact that (the deep sea) is basically most of the planet, resources have to be put into consideration and how we know how we affect it and how it works.”