A species of ‘snailfish’, which lives over 7km deep, has been photographed by an international team including scientists from New Zealand.
Properly named Notoliparis kermadecensis, the fish is the deepest-living of any in the Southern Hemisphere, and can only survive at the huge pressure found at such depths, limiting their habitats to oceanic trenches.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“Dr Ashley Rowden, of National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa), said the fish were strikingly similar to the deepest fish ever caught on film – another snailfish known as Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis – at 7700m in the Japan Trench in 2008.
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“A specimen of the Kermadec fish has only been caught once, in 1952 by the Danish Galathea expedition, and in 2007 it was photographed at a shallower depth of 6900m.”
