Ghost fish is the best diver
ZOOLOGY Only twice as long as a cigar and equipped with wafer thin skin, so you can see its liver from the outside. The fish that lives at the lowest ocean depths does not look very tough nor able to resist the huge water pressure at depths of 8,000+ m.
Nevertheless the fish, Pseudoliparis swirei – also known as the Mariana snailfish – has now officially been named the world's deepest fish, after scientists took a closer look at it and named the species based on specimens collected in the Mariana Trench.
The fish was originally spotted at unbelievable depths back in 2014, when it unofficially beat the previous record holder, which is also a snailfish.
In order to give the new snailfish an official name and a title, scientists first had to analyse collected versions of the fish. This has now been done, and the title has been claimed. Recently, a Japanese deep sea mission filmed a group of snailfish swimming about at a depth of 8,178 m in the Mariana Trench, and that is the new official world record.
Although the deepest place of the ocean reaches almost another 3 km into the abyss, it is, according to marine biologists, unlikely that we will ever spot fish at much lower depths than the Mariana snailfish. This is due to the fact that the pressure is so intense that the fish will be unable to preserve the chemical compounds such as proteins inside their bodies.