Bird-like fish emerges from the deep
Atlantic fishermen’s catch had ‘glowing’ green eyes and snout resembling a beak
Arare fish caught off Canada’s Atlantic coast is making waves around the world for its freakish appearance.
The slimy specimen was hauled up from the depths last month about 480 kilometres offshore between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, according to deckhand Scott Tanner, whose pictures of the beast have since gone viral.
The 23-year-old Lunenberg, N.S., native has only been working as a fisherman for about a year, but said it was the oddest fish he’d ever seen. “That one definitely tops it so far, for sure.”
The fish was caught by a 55-metre vessel sailing from a port in Newfoundland in the midst of a 42-day fishing trip. Its crew was using a ground trawl to catch redfish and cod along the sea floor when the strange creature was caught up in a net and dumped into the stern of the boat. Tanner said it startled the crew.
“It came out through the doors and everybody just stopped for a second and looked at it.”
Tanner told the Star what struck him most were the creature’s “glowing” green eyes, as well as a beaklike snout and wing-like fins that made it look more like a bird than a sea creature.
He estimated that the fish was about 1.2 metres long and weighed 4.5 kilograms.
Even veteran fishermen aboard couldn’t name it, although one or two said they had seen fish like it before, Tanner recalled. After a brief discussion about what it could be, the crew allowed the fish to go back into the ocean. But not before Tanner snapped some photos on his phone so that he could identify the creature later.
Despite its bizarre appearance, it doesn’t appear the fish was deformed. Tanner, who returned to shore about a week ago, now believes it was a knife-nosed or long-nosed chimaera, a rarely encountered, shark-like fish.
Paul Snelgrove, an ocean science and biology professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, agreed that the fish appeared to be a chimaera. Though uncommon, he said they are accidentally caught from time to time, and their unusual appearance is related to the deep-sea environ- ment in which they live.
“They have fairly large eyes to help spot organisms in lowlight conditions, since they occur deeper than 500 metres in most instances,” he said, adding the pressure and temperature change pulling fish up from such depths usually kills them. And though chimaeras may look weird lying in the stern of a ship, Snelgrove said in their natural setting they’re “quite elegant swimmers.”
Like sharks, chimaeras are boneless and have skeletons made of cartilage. They feed on small animals that live along the sea floor, like molluscs and other invertebrates, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s guide to Sharks, Batoids, and Chimaeras of the North Atlantic.
Since he posted the photos to Facebook on March 4, Tanner said he’s been inundated by calls from media. He said the attention has been “pretty crazy” but he understands why people are captivated by the animal.
“You don’t see it every day, a fish with glowing eyes that looks sort of like a bird, coming out of the water around Nova Scotia.”