By conventional standards, the new species of fish discovered deep in the Gulf of Mexico is not beautiful.
Actually, by almost any standard, it’s hideous.
But this spiky, snaggletoothed fish, a sea creature from somebody’s nightmares, is adapted to the harsh world below 3,000 feet, where it was co-discovered by a scientist at Nova Southeastern University.
Deep-sea expert Tracey Sutton identified the species while studying sea life at extreme ocean depths in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, the university announced Wednesday.
The new species, now named Lasiognathus dinema, was found as part of a research trawl that samples marine life at various ocean depths. In effect, they haul up a lot of dead stuff and see what they have.
Working with Theodore Pietsch from the University of Washington, Sutton found one species of anglerfish that had never been seen before. In fact they found three samples, all females, somewhere between 3,300 and 4,900 feet.
The new species uses a lure mounted on its head to attract prey. Anyone seeing photos of the thing may be glad to learn it’s tiny. The largest of the three samples was less than four inches long.
Fish of the deep ocean tend to look pretty scary, with enormous mouths and needle-like teeth. Sutton said this is because they must be able to grab any available food in a difficult environment in which nutrition is hard to obtain.
“It’s just a really harsh place to live,” he said. “There’s no sunlight. It’s cold all the time. There’s a lot of pressure. There’s not a lot of food. Anything you see, you’d better eat it.”
Sutton said the discovery of a new species shows how little we know about life in the deep ocean, a region defined as beginning at 1,000 meters, or about 3,300 feet.
Working under a federal oil-spill damage assessment program, they surveyed an area around the spill site the size of West Virginia. They are creating a baseline for what lives there so the next time there’s a disaster, we will have a prior situation with which to compare it.
“What the Deepwater Horizon spill demonstrated is our lack of information on the what lives in the depths,” Sutton said. “It’s the largest living space on earth, and we actually know very little about it.”