A bumpy pink fish with blue eyes and beard-like appendages is photographed floating above 10,700 feet (3,300 meters) deep off the California coast, floating on the muddy bottom of Monterey Canyon.
This strange little catfish was captured on camera by a group led by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Institute (MBARI) and turned out to be one of three newly identified snail species living in the persistent darkness and crushed pressures of ocean depths.
Even by snail standards, catanfish are considered rare. Some people have suction cups on their stomachs. With over 400 known species, snails live in ecosystems, from shallow tide pools to the deepest ditches on Earth.
You might like it
“In addition to being an important part of the ecosystem, snails provide the opportunity to study evolution into the deep sea within one family,” McKenzie Gellinger, team leader, associate professor of biology at Geneseo State University, told Live Science.
“Comparing shallow-living snails with their deep family relatives will help them better understand how they need to adapt to their deep-sea living,” added Gerringer.
Scientists discovered a new pink “lumpy” catfish species (Careproctus colliculi) in 2019 and used a remotely operated vehicle to explore the Monterey Canyon.
Later that year, a dive with Alvin, a human-occupied diving capacity, found two more new snail species at a depth of 13,100 feet (4,000 m). Jet black “Dark Catan Fish” (Careproctus Yanceyi) and “Refined Catan Fish” (Paralyparis EM), a silver seed that does not suck blood.
“Stiffing snails from each other is a puzzle,” Gellinger said. “We are carefully searching for multiple features, including the number of vertebrae and fin rays, the location of sensory pores, and the shape and size of the special suction disks that some species use to stab the abdomen into the rock.”
The team collected measurements, examined various features along with genetic information, compared new specimens to all other known snails, and matched them. “Each new evidence reveals that these three fish are undescribed species that were previously unknown to science,” she said.
The team’s findings published on August 27 in Ichthyology and Herpetology on August 27 show that not only does catanfish thrive at the depths of these crushing, but they do not reveal the larger and richer biodiversity of the environment.
“Access to the deep sea itself is the biggest challenge of this research, requiring collaboration with engineers, scientists and ship crews,” says Gerringer. “It takes a lot of people to discover new deep-sea species, and they all combine expertise to achieve shared goals.
“In one of the better research parts of the deep seas of the world, the fact that two undescribed catanfish from the same location were collected from the same locations emphasizes whether we still have to learn about the Earth,” she said.
Source link
