According to media reports, a Russian fisherman recently found a strange-looking species while fishing in Murmansk, see the picture below
To be honest, at first glance I don't know which part to look at, because this creature looks really weird enough, according to normal cognition, this creature has fins that do not match the body size (the proportion is too large), the color of the body skin is also miserable white, and there are many dark stripes on it (just like the suture monster, foreign netizens jokingly call it "Frankenstein suture monster", see the picture below)
If you have to find a better place, I am afraid that there are only eyes, green eyeballs are some emerald appearance, and there is also a circle of white "eyeshadow" around, so the eyes are indeed somewhat beautiful.
What species is it?
From the overall point of view, although the appearance is strange and ugly, but the shape is still more similar to the fish, it should be a deep-sea fish is not wrong, but in the end, there must be a specific name, right? Regarding this question, foreign oceanographers have given the answer: it is a ghost shark! (This name sounds quite scary, but it also fits its appearance, except that the body size is not very large)
In fact, this fisherman named Roman Fedortsov is not the first time he has caught this species, the last time was in April, when he sent out a picture like this:
It is a front photo of the ghost shark, and you can see that compared to the side photo just now, the ghost shark also has a long tail! (To be honest, the frontal shot is more weird than the side shot)
- So let's take a brief look at this ghost shark:
First of all, its English name is called "ghost shark", it can be seen that the name of ghost shark is literally translated (can also be called ghost shark), if "ghost" is to describe its appearance and other characteristics, then "shark" means that this species is a kind of shark? According to the data, the relationship between the ghost shark and our modern shark is not very close, the two were separated about 400 million years ago, and can only be regarded as distant relatives.
Below is a photo of a ghost shark taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2014 at a depth of 1,200 meters
And the appearance given at the beginning of the article is somewhat different, first of all, the color becomes black, this is because the ghost shark is an adult, only the color of the juvenile is relatively light, followed by the body size is not the same, which is mainly caused by two points, one is the difference between the juvenile and the adult, and the other is that the deep-sea environment is different from the marine environment, after all, the deep-sea pressure alone is enough to change the shape.
By the way, although ghost sharks look scary, they have a small rabbit tooth (in fact, in the zoological classification, ghost sharks belong to the genus Rabbit Silver Fish)
The images below show other strange-looking deep-sea species caught by the fisherman
Why are mostly deep-sea fish ugly?
Seeing this, I think many friends have the same doubts as me, that is, why do these deep-sea fish look so ugly? Is it because the deep sea lacks sunlight, and no one can see anyone, so the appearance is perfunctory?
In fact, these species are also in order to adapt to the environment to have to grow into this, because the deep-sea environment and the ground environment have two big differences, one is the pressure, roughly speaking, every 10 meters of water depth increases, the pressure increases the amount of a standard atmospheric pressure, for the deep sea below 200 meters, deep-sea fish start to withstand 20 times atmospheric pressure, in fact, this is not much, because most deep-sea fish live in depth below 600 to 2700 meters, that is, some fish have to withstand hundreds of times atmospheric pressure.
For example, the fish in the picture below is called a water drop fish
It looks ugly, but this is not because of its original appearance, in fact, the fish's survival depth is in the range of 600 to 1200 meters, which needs to withstand 60 to 120 times the atmospheric pressure, so it has to make changes in the shape of the body, the whole body has almost no muscles, but is composed of gel substances with a density slightly less than water, and its skeleton is also very soft. However, when it was captured by humans and landed, because the external pressure quickly became smaller, its body also swelled up, and it had the appearance shown in the picture above.
However, the original appearance of people in the deep sea is like this, see the picture below
Although it is not pretty, at least it is not too much to do with ugliness.
Second, the nutrient richness is different, 200 to 1000 meters deep belongs to the weak light layer (the light is getting weaker and weaker with the depth), and below 1000 meters, it can be said that there is no sunlight, so such a dark environment makes it impossible for the bottom producers we are familiar with to photosynthesis, so there are very few nutrients in these seawater areas, so these fish can only rely on the organic matter that lands on the surface of the sea (or some species can rely on the hot springs on the seabed for survival), so it can be regarded as "lack of food and clothing".
Therefore, in order to survive better, these fish have to grow all kinds of "ingenious" organs based on such an environment, such as devouring eels, see the figure below
Slender body that looks like a fish, but has a huge mouth that is extremely incompatible, and the water depth of adult devouring eels is between 1,000 and 2,000 meters, for better hunting, they generally shine the luminous organs that shake the tail, attract the prey closer, and then keep the mouth open and swim constantly for predation.
Are there deep-sea behemoths?
Although it is inevitable that deep-sea fish are ugly, this reminds us of another problem:
We often get the impression in novels or movies that the dark deep sea lurks with huge and terrifying beasts! But is this true? Will there be an incomparably terrifying beast at the bottom of the deep sea?
In fact, from the introduction of the previous paragraph, we can conclude that there is no giant beast at the bottom of the deep sea, or there is no condition for its survival, because a simple truth, if there is a deep sea giant beast, then it is shown to be the top of the deep sea food chain, and the species at the top need the support of the species at the bottom of the layer below to survive, and the deep sea is so barren, the existing species still need the organic matter floating on the upper layer of the ocean to survive, so there is no opportunity to support a giant species.
However, the battle we have heard of the sperm whale and the king squid in the deep sea is true, because the latter is the food of the sperm whale, but this should not be the kind of terrible deep sea monster we think.