Fish Video : Scientists at the University of Western Australia have filmed a fish which is swimming at a depth previously unseen. The snailfish was found nearly eight kilometers underwater in the north Pacific Ocean of Japan, setting a new record for filming the world’s deepest fish.
The snailfish was caught on camera by the research ship DSSV Pressure Drop, which undertook a two-month expedition to the deep trenches around Japan in the Pacific. The researchers were exploring the Japan, Izu-Ogasawara, and Ryukyu trenches at the time when the camera caught the incredible species.
The unknown snailfish species of the genus Pseudoliparis was filmed at a depth of 8,336 meters below the surface of the water in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, south of Japan. The team also collected two fish in traps from a depth of 8,022 meters.
🌊 Scientists from #UWA and Japan have set a new record for the deepest fish ever filmed and caught! 🐟 They discovered a snailfish at a depth of 8,336m in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench and caught two more from 8,022m during a two-month expedition. @minderoo https://t.co/RjJ7CxD97d pic.twitter.com/kRdYJsI3yU
— UWA (@uwanews) April 3, 2023
“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,” UWA Professor Alan Jamieson, said in a statement. He added that the Japanese trenches were incredible places to explore; they are so rich in life, even all the way to the bottom.
The fish was in its nascent age and researchers said that snailfish tend to be the opposite of other deep-sea fish where the juveniles live at the deeper end of their depth range.
va“The real take-home message for me, is not necessarily that they are living at 8,336 meters, but rather, we have enough information on this environment to have predicted that these trenches would be where the deepest fish would be. In fact until this expedition, no one had ever seen nor collected a single fish from this entire trench,” Professor Jamieson added.
