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Researchers have been lucky enough to capture on camera something that no human has seen before - a pair of deep-sea fish that look like aliens from space during an unusual parasitic copulation.
Deep sea creatures have the appearance of an ominous greeting from the Precambrian era: huge heads, deathly pale eyes, fangs protruding from their mouths. Some look like amazing aliens, others like nightmarish spawns of Hell. The most famous, perhaps, are fishing rods with their luminous "rod" that glows and helps to lure prey in the darkness of the oceanic depths. Scientists have never seen them in the wild before - and now that day has come. Science magazine published unique footage of underwater "fishing", thanks to which researchers were able to study creepy sea creatures in their natural habitat.
As Kate Langin reports, this video was shot by wildlife filmmakers Kirsten and Joachim Jacobsen, a married couple who studied the area near the Azores on behalf of the Rebikov-Niggeler Foundation. They witnessed a scene of a passionate mating between a female and a male anglerfish: on the video, you can see how a female wrapped in bioluminescent threads (like a bride with a veil) ruffles her fins, while a dwarf male can be seen on her abdomen. Biologists call this sexual parasitism: during mating, two animals fuse together: the male will receive food from the female's circulatory system, and she in return will have a guaranteed supply of sperm for fertilization. Over time, almost all of the male's organs are reduced, and he will remain a simple appendage on the female's body - and several such appendages may accumulate throughout his life.
The Jacobsens were exploring a steep deep-sea reef on the southern side of San Jorge Island in a Lula1000 submersible when they suddenly discovered a pair of fishing rods at a depth of 800 meters. This allowed them to capture an hour and a half of excellent video, which they later sent to Ted Peaches, a deep-sea fish researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who confirmed the species classification of the fish and the nature of the scene. "I've been studying these animals most of my life, and I've never seen anything like this.", he said in an interview with Science.
