The researchers found the fish swimming 5 miles below the surface

News

by Patrick Riley

April 4, 2023 | 7:22 p.m

Researchers announced that researchers have captured a fish swimming at previously unrecorded depths of more than five miles below the surface of the ocean off the coast of Japan.

The unknown species of snailfish was caught on camera swimming underwater for 27,350 feet by a deep ocean vessel in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, southeast Japan, The Guardian reported.

Scientists from the Deep Sea Research Center at Mindero University in Western Australia and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology discovered the strange-looking creature — belonging to the genus Pseudoliparis — during a two-month expedition that began last year.

Days after photographing the new snailfish, the scientists caught two more Pseudoliparis belyaevi fish in the trench at 26,318 feet. The researchers told the Guardian that these fish are the first ever collected from depths of more than 8,000 meters – or 26,246 feet.

The research team has been exploring trenches off the coast of Japan with an unmanned baited vehicle known as the Probe as part of a 10-year study of the world’s deepest fish populations.

There are more than 400 known species of snail fish, which are found in almost all depths of the sea.

Species found near the ocean floor have adapted over eons to live at depths of more than 1,000 meters from the next known deep-sea fish, according to Professor Alan Jamieson, chief scientist on the expedition and founder of the Minderoo-UWA Center for Deep Sea Research.

“When you imagine what the deepest fish in the world must look like, it’s probably black, with big teeth and small eyes,” Jamieson told the Guardian. “Chances are that it has nothing to do with the deep sea — that has something to do with the darkness.”

But he said the obvious physical adaptations are fewer at extreme depths.

One of the reasons [snailfish] They are very successful because they don’t have a swim bladder.” “Trying to maintain a gas cavity is very difficult at high pressure.”

At a depth of 8,000 meters below the surface, the pressure is 800 times greater than at the ocean surface.

The pink, semi-winged creatures do not have scales like most fish, but do have a gelatinous coating around their bodies which Jamieson called a “physiologically inexpensive adaptation”.

Unlike other fish species, younger snailfish are usually found at greater depths.

“Because there is nothing else outside of it, the shallow end of the range overlaps a host of other deep-sea fish, so placing juveniles at that end likely means they will be eaten,” Jamieson told the paper. “When you go down to enormous depths, it’s over 8,000 [metres]Many of them are very, very young.”

The new discovery smashes the previous record for the deepest fish ever discovered by 158 meters, or about 518 feet. Jamison also made this discovery in 2017 – a Mariana snail in the Mariana Trench.