Posts tagged deep sea
Diaphanous Hatchetfish - Sternoptyx diaphana
There are approximately 40 species of marine hatchetfish, all with similar shapes, but varying in size from less than a silver dollar to almost six inches long. The upward-facing (but non-telescopic) eyes and downward-slanting mouth are characteristic of the Sternoptychinae family.
Like many deep-sea creatures, the hatchetfish have bioluminescent photophores on their body - unlike most other deep-sea creatures, though, the hatchetfish directly utilizes their bioluminescence in how they disguise themselves.
The low levels of light that they give off on the bottom half of their body reflect against their silvery scales, giving predators below them the impression that the only thing above is the sky (even if the sky might be thousands of meters above). Complimentary to that camouflage, the upper half of the hatchetfish is more darkly colored, giving predators above the impression that there’s nothing but open ocean below them. This type of camouflage is called “counterillumination”.
Résultats des campagnes scientifiques accomplies sur son yacht par Albert Ier, prince souverain de Monaco. Albert I, Prince of Monaco, 1911.
The Blobfish - Psychrolutes marcidus
Blobfish are curious creatures - they come to us looking like deflated “Ziggy” caricatures, which is not at all what they resemble in life; they are incredibly lazy, yet incredibly efficient; they are more gelatinous cube than fish, and they display bizarre and unique behaviors that are not known in other species.
The Psychrolutidae (from Gr. psychrolouteo, “to have a cold bath”) family contains the fatheads, fathead sculpins, and blobfish. All are sea-floor dwelling fish, found between 330ft (100m) and 9200ft (2800m) below sea level, and the Psychrolutes themselves live solely off of Australia, Tasmania, and parts of New Zealand. The most famous (at least online) of the Psychrolutes is the blobfish, Psychrolutes marcidus.
Unlike most fish, blobfish don’t have gas bladders for buoyancy. Instead, they’re primarily composed of a goopy gelatinous flesh with a specific gravity just slightly above the ocean water, and almost no muscle. This allows them to bob along the ocean floor without expending much energy. It’s also what makes them collapse completely when they’re brought into the air - the flesh and skin can’t hold up like the muscle and bones of other fish can. Blobfish consume most small creatures that fall to or reside upon the ocean floor, especially crustaceans such as crabs.
Despite their normally-“lazy” disposition, blobfish (especially the blob sculpin) display a curious behavior with their eggs: the male protects them until they hatch, often by almost “sitting” on them. Presumably this is the most efficient way to protect a brood where one cannot find a suitable crevasse and no plant life exists, but it has not been seen in any other deep-sea fish.
The Psychrolutes were first discovered in 1926 by Australian ichthyologist Alan Riverstone McCulloch, during dredging to survey local fauna off of East Australia. Dredging today still poses the largest threat to this fish and its relatives; by-catches during deep-sea commercial fishing and lobster trawling are driving the blobfish quickly towards extinction. How wryly ironic, when this fish is completely inedible.
Sources:
Blobfish on Fishbase
Blobfish on Fish Index
Blobfish: world’s most ‘miserable looking’ marine animal facing extinction. The Telegraph, 26 Jan 2010.
Images:
Top Left: Blobfish greeting card from Oceana.org
Top Right: Knit blobfish from Tatting my Doilies
Bottom Left: Swimming Blobfish from The Frog Bag
Bottom Right: Blobfish and Snailfish, TEARA New Zealand.
Rabbit Fish, or Rat Fish (Chimaera monstrosa)
Not to be confused with the Rabbitfish, a group of brightly-colored reef-dwellers.
The rat fish is one of the few fish of the order Chimaeriformes that you can see in person. Though a member of an order that dwells up to 2600 meters (8500 feet) below the surface of the ocean, they are capable of living at surface-level relatively easily, and as such are one of the only Chimaeridae (also known as ghost sharks or ghost fish) that are kept in public aquariums.
Chimaera are the closest living relatives to sharks, though they diverged over 400 million years ago. We have abundant fossil evidence of their evolution to their current forms, and they’re one of the most-studied orders of cartilaginous fish. These fish are the only vertebrates to retain vestigial evidence of a third set of limbs.
Illustrations de Ichtyologie ou histoire naturelle générale et particulière des Poissons. Marcus Elieser Bloch et al., 1795.
I presume you mean Eulagisca uschakovi?
They’re from the deep Antarctic ocean, and are presumed to be scavengers, though they probably wouldn’t pass up a chance at cannibalism or eating another worm of the Polychaeta taxon should it pass by.
The eversible jaws are needed because the worms wiggle along the bottom of the ocean, and big ol’ teeth tend to get caught up on stuff and hinder movement pretty badly. However, if it didn’t have those jaws, how would it get meat off of the dead animals it eats?
Honestly, I find all of the Eulagisca to look like used kitchen scrubbers that someone put a pair of bad dentures in. Other deep-sea creatures are far more creepy to me (sea spiders *shudder*). I do see where they could be scary to a lot of people, though.
The first Eulagisca was found when the Challenger expedition trawled the Antarctic waters, back in 1885. It wasn’t classified until 1887, however. There was a LOT brought up in those nets that no one had ever seen before…
The Antarctic Invertebrate database run by the Smithsonian has some great photos of the different species of the genus! If you click through all the way to the individual specimens collected, you can see how each of them shows the various traits common to the the Polychaete sub-family Eulagiscinae. Also: how each of them looks like a fleshy scrubby-brush with dentures. :D
There are a few old scientific illustrations of the genus, but holy wow are they boring. All of them are compiled within this re-evaluation of the genus Eulagisca, performed in 1997, following the discovery of the two most recent species, including Eulagisca uschakovi.
See lots more deep-sea creatures on the blog! Even more coming tomorrow morning. :3
More on scaleworms:
Scotoplana sp. - Scotoplane or Sea Pig
The Holothurian (sea cucumber) genus Scotoplanes includes the “Sea Pigs” - deep-sea dwellers that live on the abyssal planes of oceans worldwide, including in the Antarctic. Anywhere over 1000 meters probably hosts Sea Pigs in some number. They prefer freshly-fallen organic matter for their food, and can travel miles to find things like whale carcasses, thanks to their excellent olfactory senses.
Sea Pigs and other sea cucumber species are some of the few hosts that exist on the abyssal floor which are suitable hosts to parasitic snails and tiny crustaceans, and they also serve as an important food source for other deep-sea creatures, such as sleeper sharks.
The Royal Natural History - Vol IV. Richard Lydekker, 1896.
postnatural: look at this smug little shit
“Welcome to the cockeyed world of artist-photographer Lori Nix, as she takes us behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum. Nix’s diminutive dioramas unfold as microcosms—where the world of science collides with an overactive imagination, with amusing results. Nix fabricates these elaborate miniature scenes in her Brooklyn studio, forgoing any kind of digital intervention. Nix: “I’m greatly enamored with the Natural History Museum, and visit it as often as I can. My series Unnatural History is a look at the inner workings of the museum. The images feature animals and situations where the science and/or facts they represent are a little confused.”
Description from Rebecca Horne’s (rather excellent) Discover magazine blog “Visual Science”
These are great! And now I want to be friends with both Lori Nix and Rebecca Horne.
I know these aren’t exactly what the blog’s about, but they’re too cool to pass up! Read the entire article over at Discover Magazine.
Chauliodus sloanii, Melanocetus johnsoni, Malacosteus niger, Eurypharynx pelicanoides
Some fish of the deep: Sloane’s Viperfish, Humpback Blackdevil, Black Swallower, Pelican Eel.
The fish presented here have very different hunting strategies, all fitting into a specific niche in their environment:
- Sloane’s Viperfish actively hunts down prey, rockets towards them, impaling them on its long teeth, using a modified first vertebra to absorb the shock of the impact.
- The Humpback Blackdevil (Deep-Sea Anglerfish/Black Seadevil) stays still, and attracts crustaceans and lanternfish/bristlemouths with its lure, before gulping them down, often while they’re still alive.
- Black Swallowers find other bony fishes, grip them by their tail, and “walks” its jaws over the prey until the prey is fully coiled within their huge distendable stomach.
- Pelican Eels have huge jaws that are detachable, like a snake, and a massive stomach capacity. But despite this, their teeth are tiny, and their primary diet is small crustaceans.
Cool fish with cool ways of eating!
The Mighty Deep and What We Know of It. Agnes Giberne, 1902.
Melanocetus johnsonii - Humpback anglerfish (female)
Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London. 1864.
1. Chimaera mirabilis (Hydrolagus mirabilis) - Large-eyed rabbitfish
2. Macrurus aequalis (Nezumia aequalis) - Smooth grenadier
The large-eyed rabbitfish lives about 450-1200 m underwater. The smooth grenadier (one of the prototypical rattail fish) has a larger range, from 200-3000 m down.
The Galathea Deep Sea Expedition, 1950-1952. Translated from Danish by Reginald Spink
Galatheathauma axeli (now Thaumatichthys axeli)
Check out that hanging thing inside this fish’s mouth. Unlike the other anglerfish, which have their bioluminescent lures on a fishing-rod sort of protuberance attached to their head, the Thaumatichthys spp. all have their lures dangling from the front of their top jaws.
They’re just aquatic mousetraps attached to stomachs!
The Galathea Deep Sea Expedition, 1950-1952. Translated from Danish by Reginald Spink
Chiasmodus niger (now Chiasmodon niger) - The Black Swallower
These fish are noted for their ability to swallow other fish that are much larger than themselves. Sometimes they end up swallowing fish so large that they can’t digest them before decomposition sets in, and the gasses released from decomposition drag the black swallower to the surface, where it can’t survive.
Relatively recently, a black swallower that was 19 cm long (7.4 in) floated to the surface. When it was retrieved, it was found to have swallowed a snake mackerel that was 86 cm (34 in) long. Given that snake mackerels would just as soon eat a black swallower and are themselves aggressive predators, it’s not known how the little fish managed to swallow one.
The Depths of the Ocean. John Murray and Johan Hjort, 1912.
Humpback Anglerfish - Melanocetus johnsonii
These anglerfish are found anywhere temperate/tropical where the sea floor is somewhere around 2,000 m/6600ft down, and are considered deep-sea fish. They’re also known as “black seadevils”, from their scientific name. The Humpback Anglerfish are sort of a “standard” anglerfish, in that they’re from the deep sea, the females have the glowing rod protruding from their head, and the males permanently attach themselves to the females as a breeding method.
Die Tiefsee-Fische. Ergebnisse der deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition ‘Valdivia’, 1898-1899. Brauer, A., 1906.
The order that the Vampire Squid belongs to (Vampyromorphida) is an ancient phylogenic relict - Vampire Squid are the only remaining species in the order, and shares traits with both octopuses and squid.
Scientific Results of the German Deepsea Expedition on Board the Steamship “Valdivia” - 1898-1899. The Cephalopoda, Part I: Oegopsia.Carl Chun, 1911-1914
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A blog for all biological and medical ephemera, from the age of Abraham through the era of medical quackery and cure-all nostrums. Featuring illustrations, history, and totally useless trivia from the diverse realms of nature and medicine.
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