Fish Footage From Five Miles Down

A team comprised of British and Japanese researchers has released the first footage of hadal snailfish, taken nearly 5 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean. There are various species of snailfish, some of which can be found in shallower waters, but the hadal is found almost exclusively in depths exceeding 6000 meters, where they feed on small shrimp who scavenge the carcasses of dead marine life.

Not much is known about snailfish. They are scaleless with a thin, gelatinous skin though some species have spines. Breeding habits of different species vary; the abysmal snailfish (Careproctus ovigerum) has been known to practice “mouth breeding”, in which the male carries the eggs in its mouth while they develop and other members of this same genus lay their eggs in the gill cavities of king crabs. Some species live out their entire existence inside other animals:

“The diminutive inquiline snailfish (Liparis inquilinus) of the northwestern Atlantic is known to live out its life inside the mantle cavity of the scallop Placopecten magellanicus.”

It is fascinating footage, but it must be pointed out that deeper fish have been found. On January 23, 1960 Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the U.S. Navy piloted the bathyscaph Trieste to the sea floor of the deepest area of the Marianas Trench, known as Challenger Deep, a depth of 35,800 feet, nearly 7 miles. Here’s what Piccard described:

“…. And as we were settling this final fathom, I saw a wonderful thing. Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about 1 foot long and 6 inches across. Even as I saw him, his two round eyes on top of his head spied us – a monster of steel – invading his silent realm. Eyes? Why should he have eyes? Merely to see phosphorescence? The floodlight that bathed him was the first real light ever to enter this hadal realm. Here, in an instant, was the answer that biologists had asked for the decades. Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could! And not only that, here apparently, was a true, bony teleost fish, not a primitive ray or elasmobranch. Yes, a highly evolved vertebrate, in time’s arrow very close to man himself. Slowly, extremely slowly, this flatfish swam away. Moving along the bottom, partly in the ooze and partly in the water, he disappeared into his night. Slowly too – perhaps everything is slow at the bottom of the sea – Walsh and I shook hands.”

Underwater footage of Hadal Snailfish [YouTube] : Evening Express : Wikipedia