Say hello to the deepest-dwelling fish ever caught on camera
A team of scientists from Australia and Japan didn’t need a super-long fishing pole to catch the deepest fish ever recorded. All it took was a camera, some bait, and a deep-sea submersible support vessel. The team managed to snap a photo of an unknown snailfish species from the genus Pseudoliparis at a record-breaking 27,349 feet below the ocean’s surface.
In August 2022, the team boarded the research ship DSSV Pressure Drop for a two-month long expedition to explore three deep trenches of the northern Pacific Ocean: the 23,950 feet deep Ryukyu trench, the 26,246 feet deep Japan trench, and the 30,511 feet deep Izu-Ogasawara trench. The research was part of a 10 year-long study into the deep sea dwelling fish populations.
The small fish was caught on camera in the In the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, south of Japan. This deep sea dweller beats the previous record of 26,830 feet set in 2017 by a Mariana snailfish found in the Mariana trench near Guam.
