Freaky fish from abyss
Deep sea finds stun scientists
SCIENTISTS scouring a huge abyss off Australia’s east coast have returned from their new frontier with a menagerie of newly discovered or rare deep ocean creatures, including faceless fish, zombie worms and a herd of sea pigs.
Perhaps a third of the marine invertebrates and some of the weird fish and luminescent creatures found during the 31day voyage by CSIRO research ship Investigator are believed to be completely new to science.
Plucked from the dark, crushing depths of up to 4km in the mysterious abyss stretching from Launceston to Brisbane, the Museums Victoria-led CSIRO and NESP Marine Biodiversity Hub research team has chronicled species including: COFFINFISH with a rod-like stem on its head topped with fluffy bait to catch prey; GIANT anemone-sucking sea spiders, whose body is a “tube within a tube” and are among the oldest arthropods on Earth; A BLOB fish with soft, watery flesh, found 2.5km off the NSW coast (the cousin of Mr Blobby, voted the world’s ugliest animal when found in the Tasman Sea in 2003); A SHORTARSE feelerfish, or Bathymicrops brevianalis, named for its short-based anal fin; A FACELESS fish without eyes and a smile scientists likened to Mona Lisa, which had rarely been seen for 140 years; FLESH-EATING crustaceans, or amphipods, deep-sea scavengers that eat almost anything on the ocean floor; ZOMBIE worms, or osedax; without mouths they use bacteria to digest and are often found burrowed into the bones of decaying whales; A COOKIE cutter bioluminescent shark with teeth like a steak knife, which inhabits the so-called “twilight zone” depth of 1000m; A DUMBO octopus, which flaps earlike fins to glide through the water; “Australia’s deepsea environment is larger in size than the mainland, and until now, almost nothing was known about life on the abyssal plain,” the voyage’s chief scientist and Museums Victoria’s Senior Curator of Marine Invertebrates Dr Tim O’Hara said. Sailing into Brisbane yesterday, Museums Victoria’s senior curator of Ichthyology Dr Martin Gomon said about 5000 marine samples had been taken during the abyss research and further work would now be done to identify and confirm what new species were discovered. Beam trawl and a snow-sled type trawling of the abyss to 4000m was used to collect samples but the Investigator’s camera array could only operate to a depth of 2000m.