The deepest living fish ever recorded have been caught — and caught on camera — miles beneath the surface of the north Pacific Ocean.
In total darkness except for a light cast onto the bottom of a deep-sea trench by researchers using an autonomous deep-ocean vessel, the unknown snailfish species was recorded at a bone-crushing depth of 27,349 feet (8,336 meters).
The snailfish — of the genus Pseudoliparis, which resemble a ghoulishly large tadpole — was a small juvenile that has greater capabilities of living at such depths, the opposite of other deep-sea fish. They were found in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench south of Japan during a two-month voyage by a joint Australian-Japanese scientific expedition.
The record-breaking discovery was part of a decadelong study into the world’s deepest fish populations that was carried out by the University of Western Australia and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology.
“We have spent over 15 years researching these deep snailfish; there is so much more to them than simply the depth, but the maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing,” Alan Jamieson, the director of the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre, said in a statement Monday.
Days after the fish were filmed, the team collected two snailfish (Pseudoliparis belyaevi) in traps set 26,319 feet (8,022 meters) deep in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench.
In remarkable footage released Sunday, a number of translucent, scaleless fish with winglike fins and eel-like tails can be seen swimming in a black abyss, illuminated by a spotlight cast from a baited camera. It wasn’t immediately clear how big the fish were.
“In other trenches such as the Mariana Trench, we were finding them at increasingly deeper depths just creeping over that 8,000m mark in fewer and fewer numbers, but around Japan they are really quite abundant,” Jamieson said.
These snailfish were the first fish to be collected from depths greater than 26,247 feet (8,000 meters), the statement…
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