The deep ocean is the Earth’s final frontier. As of the year 2000, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that 95% of the world’s oceans and 99% of the ocean floor, has yet to be explored.
The major reason is that these remote parts of the globe are
hard to reach and expensive to explore.
The Mariana trench is the deepest part of the ocean, 36,200 feet below the surface and it has only been visited by humans three times. In 1960, the U.S. Navy sent a deep-diving craft to the deepest part of the trench for about twenty minutes before the divers had to be brought up.
It was also visited by “Titanic” director James Cameron in
2012 and undersea explorer Victor Vescovo in 2019. Disturbingly, upon reaching
the bottom of the trench, Vescovo discovered a plastic bag and a candy wrapper.
Humans only have only had a glimpse at the amazing biodiversity that lives down in the deep, dark ocean.
But what we do know is the fish we have seen look a lot
different than those near the surface. Fish in the deep ocean live in darkness so
they tend to have bulging eyeballs to catch every scrap of light.
On the seafloor, these creatures often have spindly legs so they don’t sink through the mushy ocean floor.
Roman Fedortsov, a fisherman from Murmansk, a port city in northern Russia, has developed a robust following on social media for sharing photos of some of the freaky fish he catches from the deepest of deep waters.
He often hauls up monstrous-looking fish from the ocean that look like creatures from a horror film. The fish appear even crazier than they would in the deep waters because their swim bladders blow up when they are brought to the surface.
Swim bladders are gas-filled organs in the fish that help them move up and down, depending on the water’s surface pressure. “Fishes with swim bladders become distorted when brought up to the surface if they live at depth, Paul Snelgrove, told Popular Science.
“I decided to create my Instagram and Twitter accounts because many people have no idea how the fish could look like,” Fedortsov told CTVNews via email. “I was really impressed by the appearance of some deep fish and I wanted to share my experience with other people.”
Here are some photos of Fedortsov’s freakiest fish. You can follow him on Instagram.
