Finding The World’s Deepest Fish
While aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s vessel RV Falkor for 30 days exploring the deepest trenches in the Pacific, Alan Jamieson and his colleagues discovered a snailfish living eight kl below the waves. This was deeper than any fish we know of. His colleagues from the University of Hawaii recovered some in their traps. He states in his blog that, “In the past six years we have made many discoveries in the depths, such as the missing order of Decapoda (shrimps) that were long thought absent from the trenches but are actually rather conspicuous”. They also found the “supergiant” amphipod, a crustacean 20 times the size of it’s relatives seen in shallow waters, in the Kermadec Trench off New Zealand. They also filmed lots of tadpole like snailfish that were found in multiple trenches, as deep as 7700m in the Japan Trench. He continues to say that, “A device used to gather samples of ocean floor had an inspection camera on it to monitor the equipment. One night after a dive to 7900m when watching the footage coming back in, a strange ethereal little fish swam past. That got our eyebrows raised. It looked like a snailfish, but was extremely fragile (even for a snailfish) and had a very distinctive appearance”. They found the deepest at 8145m, which is 500m deeper than the record from the Japan Trench.
