Faceless fish found in Aussie deep sea
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FACELESS fish and other weird and wonderful creatures, many of them new species, have been hauled up from the deep waters off Australia during a scientific voyage studying portions of the ocean never explored before.
The monthlong journey off the country’s eastern seaboard has been surveying life lurking in a dark and cold abyss that plunges 4 kilometers below the surface, using nets, sonar and deep-sea cameras.
Chief scientist on board The Investigator Tim O’Hara from Museums Victoria said yesterday the search area was “the most unexplored environment on earth.”
Bright red spiky rock crabs, puffed-up coffinfish, blind sea spiders and deep sea eels have been collected since the scientists began their voyage — from Launceston in Tasmania north towards the Coral Sea — on May 15.
They also came across an unusual faceless fish, which has only been recorded once before by the pioneering scientific crew of HMS Challenger off Papua New Guinea in 1873.
“It hasn’t got any eyes or a visible nose and its mouth is underneath,” O’Hara said from the ship.
At such huge depths, it is so dark that creatures often have no eyes or produce their own light through bioluminescence, he added.
Another find was carnivorous sponges that wield lethal spicules made of silicon, effectively glass. They get small crustaceans hooked on their Velcro-like spines, to be slowly digested in-situ.
This technique differs from most deep-sea sponges, which feed on bacteria and other single-celled organisms filtered from passing currents.
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