Life in the Abyss

Beneath the Ocean floor there are a lot of diversified creatures spreading on the whole three-fourth (¾) parts of the earth, and it’s the Ocean, a very huge component of the mother Earth. How can we say that all of the creatures under the Ocean have seen by all of us? Neither the expert marines nor professionals in the field of aquatic research have seen all of the creatures in the sea. On the other hand, due to the intelligence and perseverance of some people on this field, few of the amazing sea creatures found. I was very stunned the way they discover new things and I consider this as one of my fulfillment. Thanks to them.

Talk about all mouth. Eurypharynx pelecanoides, known colloquially as the "umbrellamouth gulper," throws wide its loosely hinged jaws and balloons out its mouth to engulf hapless fishes, which are deposited in the pouchlike lower jaw (hence its common name, pelican eel). Though a fearsome-looking creature, the pelican eel is only two feet long, including the whiplike tail. It lives in all the world's oceans at depths exceeding 6,500 feet.

In this image, the anglerfish Melanocetus johnsoni not only looks like a basketball, it looks like it could swallow one. Perhaps impressed by its rounded aspect, the scientist describing this ball of a fish even gave it a generic name that means "black whale." Yet appearances can be deceiving. For all its ferocious aspect, the "common black-devil," as this species is known, reaches a maximum length of five inches.

The viperfish, Chauliodus sloani, has such lengthy lower fangs that they don't even fit in its mouth, but rather project back dangerously close to the eyes. No Chauliodus has ever been photographed in its natural habitat, but a scientist who saw one from the window of his bathyscaph off Portugal reported that it hovered "head upwards, the long axis of its body making an angle of about 45° to the horizontal plane. The whiplike dorsal ray was inclined forwards so that the tip dangled in front of the mouth. Here, surely, is good circumstantial evidence for deep-sea angling."

It's not hard to see why the common name of Anoplogaster cornuta is "fangtooth." (It has also been dubbed "ogrefish.") In this species, juveniles differ so strikingly from adults that it took 50 years for fish biologists to realize that Anoplogaster and a genus they were calling Caulolepsis were one and the same animal, just of different ages. Fangtooths (or should we say "fangteeth"?) are found in tropical and temperate waters down to 16,000 feet.

You wouldn't want to meet a hungry Saccopharynx lavenbergi in the depths. These babies can reach six feet in length, have rows of sharp little teeth, and, like pythons of the deep, can swallow prey much fatter than themselves. They down victims whole, of course, which is why they're called "gulpers." They simply ease them through their "sack-gullet" (hence the term Saccopharynx) and into their stomach, where digestion takes over.

"No, it can't be," might be your first reaction on seeing the deep-sea anglerfish Linophryne arborifera, whose genus name means "toad that fishes with a net" (which shows you how baffled scientists were initially, too). In this species, both the pearl-onion bulb atop the head and the hanging garden of bioluminescent filaments below glow as a lure to unsuspecting prey, which meet a nasty end in its ferociously fanged jaws. As artist Richard Ellis points out, this coal-black fish would surely be considered "one of the most horrifying of sea monsters" were it not the size of a baby's fist.

It's hard to say which is more fantastic, the fish or its name. Grammatostomias flagellibarba, whose name means "lined stomiatid with a whip-barbel," is only six inches long, but its chin barbel can be six feet in length. As if such an absurd appendage were not enough to impress friends and enemies alike, this fanged freak of the deep, with its double row of luminously blue-violet organs running down its flanks, can light up like nature's stab at a spaceship.

For its size, the "vampire squid from hell," Vampyroteuthis infernalis, has the largest eyes of any animal. A six-inch specimen bears globular eyeballs the size of a large dog's. Such impressive orbs, coupled with its winglike fins and its ability to turn on and off at will a constellation of photophores -- tiny lights all over its body -- help this dark-bodied beast find prey at the lightless depths at which it lives, more than 3,000 feet down.

Biologists have gone to great lengths to describe the long-nosed chimaera, Harriotta raleighana, whose kind can reach five feet in length. Its stiletto-like nose reminded one of "the nose contour of a supersonic jet aircraft." Others have dubbed it "rattail," for obvious reasons. In South Africa, it is known as the "ghost shark," though it is only distantly related to sharks. A touch of the venomous spine on the first dorsal fin can kill a person, though such a fate is unlikely given the 8,000-foot depths at which this creature lives.

Caulophryne polynema translates as "stalked toad with many filaments," but with its quill-like fin rays it looks more like some piscine porcupine. The type specimen of this deep-sea angler was hauled up by Madeira fishermen, who found a black, eight-inch-long fish with a belly so distended that it seemed the fish had swallowed an orange. Poking from the fish's mouth was the tail of a significantly larger fish, which was somehow attracted by this fearsome-looking fish, possibly by the delicately plumed lure adorning its forehead.

With a face only a mother could love, Himantolophus groenlandicus looks like a middle linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers, which may have something to do with how it got its common name, the "footballfish." The species holds pride of place as the first deep-sea angler ever found. The original specimen washed ashore in Greenland in 1833; at 22 inches long, it is still the largest one on record. Since no females of this species have ever been found bearing parasitic males, biologists assume they are fertilized by free-swimming mates.

Once called "a grotesque among grotesques," Lasiognathus saccostoma has an overbite to end all overbites. Yet this three-inch-long fish has also been called "the compleat angler of the abyss," for it comes equipped with nature's equivalent of a fishing rod, complete with lure and three bony hooks. Though the precise function of this contraption is unknown, the undersea explorer William Beebe suggested in 1930 that it might be "cast swiftly ahead, when the hooks and lights would so frighten any pursued fish that they would hesitate long enough to be engulfed in the onrushing maw."

In the bituminous blackness of the deep sea, what an alluring sight to a fish must be the luminescent organ dangling from the toothy jaws of Thaumatichthys axeli, "Prince Axel's wonder-fish." The first specimen of this black, 18-inch bottom-dweller was trawled from a depth of 11,778 feet in the Atlantic by the Galathea expedition of 1950-52. The voyage's chronicler deemed the find "unquestionably the strangest catch of the Galathea expedition, and altogether one of the oddest creatures in the teeming variety of the fish world."

Its telescopic eyes and pair of elongated tail rays, which triple its overall length to almost three feet, have gained Stylephorus chordatus two common names, "tube-eye" and "thread-tail." Yet striking as they are, these features hold nothing on the mouth. This balloonable cavity can expand to 38 times its original size as the fish sucks in seawater through its tubular mouth, as if through a straw. Once filled, the mouth closes and the fish forces the water back out through its gills, leaving behind a meal of plankton.

Looking like an artist's conception of the tree of life, the basket starfish Gorgonocephalus arcticus is found from the Arctic to Cape Cod at depths reaching 4,000 feet. It belongs to the family Gorgonocephalidae ("Gorgon-headed"), which is named after the snake-haired sisters of Greek mythology. Reaching some 20 inches across, the basket star snags plankton in its canopy of branching arms and ushers them to its mouth on the underside of the center disk.

OTHER RELATED LINKS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/abyss/life/bestiary.html