Who am I? I am a fish, living in the deep sea, and you humans call me a water dropfish (Latin name: psychrolutes marcidus). This is the picture you humans took for me ↓↓
The image comes from the Internet
I heard that I often appear in your human news and what WeChat circle of friends now, and say all day long that I look very ugly and sad, like this ↓↓
What's more, I heard that there is a World Ugly Animal Society in the North of The United Kingdom, which discusses which animal looks the ugliest all day, and in 2013, many people voted, and I was voted as "the ugliest fish in the world"...
Forget it, don't mention these sad things. Just look at the photos you may not know me, I will give you a systematic introduction to yourself.
Why do humans call me "Water Drop Fish"?
I am one of 40 species in 9 genera of the Cryptocephalus family, living in the seafloor waters of the southwest Pacific Ocean for a long time, generally operating at depths of 600 to 1200 m.
My shape resembles a hypoptore, with a cartoonish fat face, small black eyes and small fins, resembling a small water droplet. Humans just see this and call me a water drop fish!
Why do I look like this?
I live in the deep sea, where the pressure is 100-200 times stronger than your ground atmosphere. In order to adapt to the deep-sea environment, my body structure and physiology had to make major "structural adjustments", especially on muscles and bones.
After a long evolution, my bones have become very thin and easy to bend, the muscle tissue is particularly flexible, and the fibrous tissue is particularly fine, which can maintain the balance of pressure inside and outside the body. One thing is different from many fish, I don't have the swim bladder in my body, because the air-filled maw is easily crushed in the deep sea.
Why do humans say I'm ugly?
You humans think it's ugly, I think I'm beautiful! It's an evolutionary adaptation, an evolutionary beauty.
However, my particular body structure also brings some problems that cannot be ignored: I cannot move up and down in the ocean on a large scale. Once ashore or in shallow water, under the pressure, my body would swell up from the inside and become what it looked like in the network. In the same way, if I were to be thrown into deeper water, I would have been crushed into fillets.
So, the pictures that you humans have passed around are not my face at all! It's just the appearance of my kind after "exploding and dying" on the shore, just like the effect you humans see in the mirror. I am in the natural state of the sea, and you humans can't take pictures without distortion for the time being, but they are certainly a hundred times better than those on the shore!
In fact, when I swim freely in the depths of the ocean, I am very elegant, but some of my kind are cruelly taken to the shore or shallow water by you humans, and are photographed after death!
Our living space is shrinking
In other words, I was supposed to live well in the depths of the ocean, and you human fishing boats often use large trawls to catch on the bottom of the sea, and then "kidnap" my kind!
In addition, some guys called foodies in humans have already targeted us, and they are still talking about delicious food! Then more people will come and arrest us...
In your eyes we look ugly, but in the deep sea we are the most free. I sincerely hope that human beings can treat animals on the earth well and become the most beautiful scenery in this world!