Science & Technology

Deepest record of a fish filmed off Japan

Sydney, Australia, Apr 3 (EFE).- A snailfish has been captured by an underwater camera at a depth of 8,336 meters, setting a record for the deepest sighting of a fish to date, Australian scientists reported Monday.

The fish was filmed in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, about 1,000 kilometers south of Tokyo, Japan, according to the University of Western Australia (UWA) in a statement.

“The maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing,” said UWA Professor and expedition chief scientist Alan Jamieson.

The scientists from the Australian university, who participated in a two-month expedition in late 2022 with peers from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, also collected in traps two Pseudoliparis belyaevi specimens at 8,022 meters deep in the Japan Trench, the first fish to be collected from depths greater than 8,000m.

“In other trenches such as the Mariana Trench, we were finding them at increasingly deeper depths just creeping over that 8,000m mark in fewer and fewer numbers, but around Japan they are really quite abundant,” the scientist said.

“The real take-home message for me, is not necessarily that they are living at 8,336m but rather we have enough information on this environment to have predicted that these trenches would be where the deepest fish would be, in fact until this expedition, no one had ever seen nor collected a single fish from this entire trench.”

Snailfish juveniles tend to live deeper than adults, which is the opposite to most fish that live in the deepest parts of the oceans, according to the statement. EFE

wat/tw

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