Deep sea creatures don’t usually make you go “aaawww.” Photo: MBARI
Living deep beneath the surface of the ocean, there lives a little fish so adorable it looks fake. It’s real, though, and we didn’t even know it existed until relatively recently. It’s name? The bumpy snailfish.
It, along with another new-to-science snailfish were discovered by researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBARI) with scientists from the University of Montana and the University of Hawaii at Mānoa on a dive on the abyssal seafloor offshore of California in 2019.
Snailfishes live pretty much all over the ocean. They can be found in the shallowest of tide pools to the deepest of marine trenches, and the bumpy snailfish was found on the latter side. It was spotted at 10,800 feet deep, and has only just been confirmed as a newly discovered species in a study published in the journal Ichthyology & Herpetology.
Despite our best efforts to know everything there is about everything, discoveries like this are a good reminder of how little we know. We know so little, in fact, that we don’t even know how much we don’t know. These two new species were discovered in a well-researched part of the ocean on a single dive is proof of that.
“The fact that two undescribed species of snailfishes were collected from the same place, on the same dive, at one of the better studied parts of the deep sea in the world highlights how much we still have to learn about our planet,” said Mackenzie Gerringer to IFLScience. Mackenzie is the study lead and associate professor of biology at New York’s Geneseo Honors College.
Deep-sea creatures don’t usually evolve to look “cute” to our eyes. Take the visibly horrifying lanternfish, for example, or the miserable-looking blobfish. This little snailfish, however, looks like something of of a Pixar film.
