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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on predators in the deep and dark parts of the ocean.
Now, for a brief recap on the previous episodes in this series, the ocean can be thought of as having several different zones, if you imagine them stacked vertically, each with different environmental conditions regarding the availability of light, the availability of food, temperature, pressure, and so forth. And
To be sure, the majority of marine fauna do live relatively close to the surface of the water, where sunlight can reach the phytoplankton and the other photoautotrophs that form the base of the food chain up there. They photosynthesize, things eat them, things eat those things, and so on.
Now, in centuries past, there were thinkers such as the naturalist Edward Forbes who observed that, you know, the deeper you trawl or plunge into the water looking for life, the less you find. And from that, he extrapolated that, you know, below a certain depth, there will be no fauna at all within the sea. This was the so-called azoic hypothesis. We, of course, now know that that is not
true. And while conditions are harsher and life forms may be less dense and less diverse in the depths than they are near the surface, there is nevertheless a fascinating world of animal interactions taking place in the deeper, darker zones of the ocean, even going all the way down to the very bottom, down to the abyssal ocean floor, and even into the sort of inverted island communities of the deep ocean trenches.
Now, when you look at the animals within these environments, some of them are grazers, you know, grazing on microbial mats. Some of them are scavengers, but some are also predators and even top predators. And that's what we've been looking at in this series, hunters in the dark parts of the ocean.
Now, in part one, we started by talking about a couple of specific organisms. One was a type of predatory amphipod crustacean called Dulcibella comanchaca, the sweet, sweet, sweet, beautiful darkness.
newly discovered and documented in a paper by Weston et al. from November 2024. This was a crustacean predator found in the Hadal zone at a depth of almost 8,000 meters in the Atacama Trench. And this led us down a tangent of looking at bizarre amphipod body forms. That was very fun. But we also, in that episode, talked about predatory siphonophores, which can have unbelievably weird body forms as well.
There's the one we talked about that's long as a whale, thin as a rail. And we discussed a specific sighting documented in 2021 of a large unidentified predatory siphonophore in Hadal waters.
Now, in part two, I started off by talking about an abyssal predatory fish found more than 4,000 meters deep in the Pacific known as the grid eye fish, which was notable, at least to me, for having these absolutely bizarre bean shaped neon yellow plate like depressions in the top of its head that apparently function as light sensitive spots for hunting bioluminescent prey.
And then after that, Rob talked about a couple of deep swimming cephalopods, the strawberry squid, which inhabits a sort of boundary zone in the mid water with a little bit of twilight above and dark water below, which requires an interesting adaptation of two different kinds of eyes on opposite sides of its body. One for seeing shadows moving against the faint sunlight above and one for seeing glowing self-illuminated organisms from below.
After that, we also talked about the Dumbo octopus, a very, very cute, interesting little critter that seems to have forsaken many of the defense mechanisms of its cephalopod kin because it lives deep where predators are less of a concern. And we're back today to talk about more.
Yeah, yeah, we have at least a couple of different classifications of critters that I think everyone is going to be fascinated by. And at least, well, I think both of them are probably anticipated as well.
Now, actually, just a couple hours ago, I was in my regular Wednesday midday yoga class, and my teacher, Allison, asked what I was working on, and I mentioned deep-sea fish. And she mentioned that the late, great David Lynch's 2006 book, Catching the Big Fish,
uh, evokes deep sea fish as a kind of treasures of introspection and meditation. Um, I don't know if anyone out there is familiar with this book. I'm to understand it's kind of an autobiography, but also a self self-help guide and gets into some of the meditative, um, concepts that David Lynch, uh, gravitated towards.
I'm going to read a quick quote here from it. Quote, Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract, and they're beautiful. Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the unified field. The more your consciousness, your awareness is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source and the bigger fish you can catch.
So I think that's pretty cool. We can quibble about deep sea gigantism and the relative small size of some of the deep sea organisms we've been discussing here. But in general, I will say, yes, these are the waters where you find organisms as deeply weird as a David Lynch film.
If my hmm sounded quibbly, it was more about the consciousness physics kind of connection there. But no, I follow the metaphor absolutely with the deep sea biology. Yeah, the fish are, certainly they've got to be more pure and whatever that means, it just feels right. And
And as we'll discuss today, probably more reeking. So are you ready for the snailfish? Let's talk about the snailfish. Okay. In part one of this series, one of the things we got into briefly was an experiment that
that was designed to monitor what would happen when a dolphin carcass was dropped into the Hadal zone. And as a reminder, the Hadal zone is the deepest 45% of the ocean in terms of vertical depth, often defined as the space deeper than 6,000 meters from the surface.
Now, while the Hadal zone is almost half of the ocean's maximum depth, it takes up less than 1% of the ocean's horizontal seafloor area because it's limited to these deep sea trenches and trench systems. So just in terms of depth, these regions are going way beyond even the abyssal depth of most of the world's ocean floor. But in terms of space taken up on the surface of the earth, very limited. They're little tiny islands.
So what this study wanted to examine was what happens when a large dead animal, in effect a huge cache of food, hits the floor of an ocean trench. This obviously happens naturally all the time, but we're not around to observe it from the beginning when it does happen. And so they staged these events where a dolphin carcass would fall down into hadal waters and then they would monitor what happens.
One of the findings was of a kind of dynamic interaction pattern where first scavengers like amphipod crustaceans would show up to eat the soft tissue of the dolphin's body. But how fast the crustaceans were able to consume that soft tissue was in part controlled by the presence of secondary predators who showed up to eat the amphipod scavengers who were eating the carcass.
And one group of secondary predators mentioned in that research was the snailfish. So I wanted to explore more about these creatures, figure out what they are and what's special about them. Yeah, who's showing up this deep to interfere with the work of the initial scavengers? So snailfishes are any of more than 100 known species of ray-finned fishes grouped into the family Liperidae.
They take different forms, but they tend to be small, with the largest growing only about a foot in length.
And not all snailfish are deep trench dwellers. Various species can be found in habitats throughout the ocean. So you'll find some of them in shallow, even shallow coastal waters, and some are in much deeper waters. In general, snailfish tend to be good at adapting to extreme environments. So a lot of snailfish species gravitate toward cold waters, such as in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
A snailfish is often shaped sort of like a tadpole. So you can think of a big bulbous head and a narrowing tail. And the deep dwelling varieties are often pale or translucent pink in color. So to picture a deep sea snailfish, imagine a fish in the form of a fat snail.
pale pink tadpole without scales on its body and instead a kind of loose, milky, see-through skin, which is usually covered in a gelatinous slime. And occasionally that skin will be prickly or spiny. They're kind of like, you've included a picture here of one, and I get a vibe of like a sort of a, like a pink, uh,
person-faced monster super baby that lives in the deep. You know, like they're weirdly kind of cute. You want to attribute various emotional states to them. And I was looking, I found other, like I found various headlines that refer to them as cuties. So it's not just like me and my own like weird sensibilities. Like a lot of people seem to think that snailfish are kind of cute.
Let's put a pin in that. We'll come back to how cute they are. But I think you're right. I think they are at once cute and gross, which is the best kind of cute. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, babies have been nailing that for ages.
So there's a lot that is interesting about snailfishes, but snailfishes have one very impressive credential that is relevant to our topic today. And that is, at least as of April 2023, a snailfish holds the record for the deepest diving fish that has ever been directly observed by humans. And I do have to put an asterisk on there because I was reading in one article, there are
claimed observations of fish that have been cited lower but like not directly imaged or documented and for various theoretical reasons we'll get into those other claims seem unlikely to be true but so yeah i guess we'll put a question mark on this the the best confirmed sighting of the deepest diving fish ever
Yeah, because there are a lot of things that are possible down there just based on how little relatively we know about it. And you can go all the way back to, you know, we talked in past episodes about the observations on the bathysphere, you know, and the varying degrees to which those reported observations have matched up or haven't matched up with subsequent human discoveries. Yeah, that's right.
But as far as well-documented cases go, this is the deepest anybody's ever seen a fish. And note that this is not the deepest organism or the deepest animal ever observed in a reliable way, just the deepest fish.
Now, here I'm relying on a University of Western Australia press release about this discovery, which was made by a team of scientists from Australia and from Japan. And I'm also relying on an April 2023 write-up in Scientific American by Tom Metcalfe.
So the location of this record-breaking discovery was within the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, which is south of Japan, at a depth of 8,336 meters. The previous record before this
The deepest confirmed sighting of a fish was held by a Mariana snailfish, more on that species in a bit, at 8,178 meters depth. And that was within the Mariana Trench back in 2017. This new find, which was deeper, was in this other trench south of Japan, the Izu Ugasawara.
This new record-holding fish in 2023 beat the previous record by 158 meters, and as far as I can tell, the observation still has not been surpassed. This sighting took place during an exploration of several trench environments in the Pacific around Japan in 2022. The expedition was conducted by a research ship called the DSSV Pressure Drop, which
So the research team used baited cameras plunked down into the deepest parts of several trenches. And at one of these baited cameras at this kind of unlikely depth of, again, 8,336 meters, a fish appeared. Interestingly, this solitary deep diver was a relatively small juvenile snailfish, which seems to be able to venture a bit deeper than the normal adult range for its species. More on that in a moment.
The fish in question was ID'd as the genus Pseudoliparis, but the exact species couldn't be verified. Also, just two days after the deep fish was caught on camera, two more snailfish were actually caught, like trapped in baited traps at a depth of 8,022 meters and brought up and rapidly preserved. In this case, the fish were identified down to the species level, and these were Pseudoliparis beliavii.
And Rob, I attached a picture from this expedition for you to look at with several of these snailfishes crowding around a baited trap. I'm not sure quite what that is on the trap. It might be a mackerel or something, but some kind of bait they've got there. And I think the idea is that the dead fish attracts the crustaceans, probably amphipods, that come to eat the dead fish. And then the snailfish show up to eat the scavengers.
Yeah, yeah. And I have to say, they look kind of cute here. It looks absolutely boopable. And for an example of a headline that invokes the cuteness, Atlas Obscura has an article about this with the title, The World's Deepest Living Fish is Surprisingly Cute.
It is kind of cute. Again, it's kind of on the boundary of cute and ugly or cute and gross, kind of in the way that we talked about this with some of the creatures that come to the bathhouse in spirited way. You know, they're right on that line there where like, are they ugly and gross or are they adorable? It's a tough call. And I think this is compounded by the fact that some of the more famous deep sea fish, though to be clear, fish that don't
dive down as deep as the snailfish. But the more famous deep-sea fish, one of which we'll get to in a bit here, are generally regarded as severely grotesque and aggressively weird-looking and not cute. So it can come as a bit of a shock where people are like, do you want to see the deepest fish ever? You're like, yeah, I'm in for a horror show. And then you look at it and you're like, well, you know, oh, quite, quite cute when I take into account my expectations. Give them a snuggle.
Now, on the other hand, I did also come across an AP article by a writer named Nick Perry, which was covering some hadel snailfish discoveries. And in that article, it said that deep sea trench snailfish look like, quote, guts stuffed in cellophane. Well, I mean, aren't we all really? But but OK, fair enough. They do also. Yeah, there is that. They do look like little pink bags of.
guts, I guess I can see it. So I was thinking about the depth of this, this one record holder. Again, that's 8,336 meters. That is so deep. That's like 5.17 miles down. Uh, so this is a five mile fish. And according to the researchers who led this team, there are strong reasons for thinking that if we ever find a fish living deeper than this, it won't be by much.
And again, this limit applies not necessarily to animals. You'll probably find crustaceans and other types of animals even deeper. But fish, they're saying you're probably not going to find one much deeper than this. And that's because there appear to be biochemical circumstances that place a pretty rigid theoretical maximum depth on how far you can go if you are a fish. Now, why would that be? How would that work?
Well, fish that live under extremely high pressure are only able to do so because of compounds in their cells called osmolites, such as the molecule, you might have read about this before, trimethylamine N-oxide or TMAO. Osmolites like TMAO act as protein stabilizers. So within an animal's cells, they
You can think of proteins as sort of the machine parts that make most cellular functions possible. Proteins need to maintain their particular folded structure in order to do what they do, much the same way that the parts in a machine need to maintain their shape and the way they move or the machine will stop working.
But physical stresses like heat and pressure can denature and deform proteins or prevent them from folding correctly. And this is one of the difficulties of life in the high-pressure conditions of the deep sea.
Hydrostatic pressure does violence to the proteins in your cells, and so high osmolite concentrations are an adaptation deep-sea animals use to get around this problem, to stabilize their proteins against the high-pressure environment and basically keep the machine parts stable and working the way they're supposed to.
And one interesting side note that I was reading about, did you know that osmolites, these compounds that stabilize proteins, are the main cause of the fishy smell of decomposing seafood?
So as a dead marine organism, you know, like a fish that's not frozen, it starts to rot in the sun, begins to decay. Bacteria break down the trimethylamine in oxide or TMAO into volatile trimethylamine, which smells fishy. That is the main part of what the fishy smell is. Interesting.
come back to that in a second. So marine biologists have found that as you go deeper and deeper in the ocean and the pressure gets greater, the fish species that live at each depth zone have higher concentrations of osmolites. Makes sense, right? That
That trend continues until you reach the maximum possible concentration of osmolites in the body tissues, which, according to theoretical models, would be the concentration that would allow fish to survive at about 8,400 meters.
So according to this model, the fish that was observed in this expedition, like 8,300 and something meters, it was within about 70 meters of the theoretical limit of fish biology. You basically can't get enough osmolites into the cells to stabilize proteins any deeper than this, which is why researchers don't expect to find a fish much deeper than this one.
You know, this makes me think back to that paper we discussed in the first episode by Desgupta et al., Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of Dolphin Carcasses in the Hadal Zone. Again, they dropped two dolphin carcasses at one of the sites. Snailfish were interfering with the initial scavengers, and on the other site, they were not.
I'm going to have to go back and look at the depths that they were discussing there and see, because it makes me wonder, well, maybe the snailfish didn't arrive at one of the drop sites because it was too deep for them. And to be clear, this would not be out of keeping with the general conclusions that were made in that paper, which were that the exact shape of the whale fall site is going to depend on the depth and on the organisms that are in its vicinity.
So again, I'm going to have to go back and look at that. Right. So it could be that if a whale carcass falls in a deeper zone that's outside of the range, you know, it's too deep for fishes, basically for predatory fishes, then the scavenging amphipods have an easier time of it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
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Now, there's something I wanted to come back to about the fact that the breakdown of osmolites, specifically TMAO, causes the fishy smell that we associate with decaying seafood. Pairing that fact with the increasing osmolite concentrations that go up with depth, the depth of a fish's natural habitat, if you put those two facts together, that made me wonder,
Do abyssal or hadal fish smell the worst? Like would the deeper fish be the most foul smelling of all the fishiest of all fishy smells? I was looking to see if there was any, you know, any research into this. I don't know if there's direct research into this exact question, but I did find a marine biologist commenting on it.
So I found a 2024 AP article by Nick Perry about research on hadel snailfish. And this article cites a marine biologist named Paul Yancey of Whitman College in Washington state, uh, who directly says, yes, indeed, the deeper the fish lives, the worse it will stink. So hadel snailfish quite likely are,
have like the ultimate fish smell they've got to be a contender i don't know if anybody's tested this directly but it seems uh a priori that would be the assumption that they are the kings of stink i also have to mention this article was the source of that comparison of trench snail fish to guts wrapped in cellophane and there was another good one in here not directly from the author but it quotes a new zealand marine ecologist named ashley roden
who caught a number of hadel snailfish for more than 7,000 meters depth in 2023. And Rodin describes holding onto one of these fish after bringing it up from, I think, a mackerel-baited trap. And Rodin says, quote, "'It was like a water-filled condom, a sloppy, gelatinous mass that moves between your hands. It was very cool and very strange to see its organs and everything.'"
But anyway, back to the discovery of the deepest fish ever from the trench south of Japan. According to Professor Alan Jameson, the chief scientist of the expedition, quote, the real take-home message for me is not necessarily that they are living at 8,336 meters, but rather we have enough information on this environment to have predicted that these trenches would be where the deepest fish would be.
In fact, until this expedition, no one had ever seen nor collected a single fish from this entire trench. Now, next I want to look at a particular species of hadel snailfish. This is the Mariana snailfish, or Pseudoliparis swearei.
S-W-I-R-E-I. It's one of these deep adapted species. It's believed to grow about a foot long. And I'm going to say this one looks even more tadpoli than most of them do. I've got a picture for you to look at here, Rob, of one specimen. Just like a pale wad of chewing gum with eye spots and a tail. Yeah, this one really does look like something that would be in David Lynch's Eraserhead. Yeah.
Can't you just imagine it talking? What would his voice sound like? It's got a cowboy accent. For some reason, it's got to. So, yeah, these things live in the Mariana Trench more than 7000 meters and up to 8000 meters below the surface. They're now believed to be the top predator within the trench ecosystem there. So they feed primarily on crustaceans, but they are probably the apex of the food chain.
This species was actually discovered fairly recently, announced in a publication in the journal Zoetaxa in 2017 by Gerringer et al. And the article was called Pseudoliparis swirii, a newly discovered hadel snailfish from the Mariana Trench.
The authors of the study described the new species on the basis of 37 individuals collected from the Mariana Trench between depths of 6,898 meters and 7,966 meters. So going almost up to the eight kilometer mark. And one thing that was interesting is despite the resource challenges we've talked about, reports are that these fish tend to be well fed in their natural range. The ones that have been caught tended to have full stomachs.
And they conclude that this fish is likely endemic to the Mariana Trench. And this is in keeping with the observation that since trench ecosystems tend to be somewhat isolated, again, kind of like inverted islands, when a snailfish species becomes locally trench adapted, it's kind of stuck there. It's kind of stuck in the specific trench environment or system it's evolved for. And the authors write, quote,
The discovery of another hadal liparid species, apparently abundant at depths where other fish species are few and only found in low numbers, provides further evidence for the dominance of this family among the hadal fish fauna. So again, snailfishes are the kings and queens of Hades.
So in the years following this initial discovery, researchers continued to look into what made the Mariana snailfish special. And I wanted to refer to a paper from 2019 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution by Kun Wang et al. called Morphology and Genome of a Snailfish from the Mariana Trench Provide Insights into Deep Sea Adaptation.
So the authors of this study begin by explaining, you know, it is largely unknown how animals, especially vertebrates, survive in the hadal zone given the extremity of the physical environment. So to better understand the vertebrates of the hadal zone, the authors look at the specific morphology and genome of Pseudoliparis swirii. I'm not going to cover everything they explore in the paper. Just wanted to mention a few interesting things that stood out to me.
Of course, as we already discussed, fish use osmolites such as TMAO to stabilize proteins, and these fish are no exception. In fact, they are prodigious osmolite factories.
On the Mariana trench snailfish, the eyes are, if you see pictures of them, it looks kind of like they have eyes, like they have little dark spots. The eyes are non-functioning. The fish did not react to lights from the lander vehicle. And genomic analysis also found that these fish were missing gene variants that are associated with photoreceptor tissues.
They have an inflated stomach. So the stomach of the snailfish is larger and takes up more space in the body cavity than in other snailfishes. Why would that be? I believe the thinking is in extreme environments where prey density is lower, you need to have space to eat more when you get the opportunity. So I think maybe you just don't ever want to be like, oh, sorry, there's food right here, but I am too full to eat it.
Right, right. Oversized stomachs is something we see in some of the other deep sea fish that we'll be talking about later.
They also had a larger liver and larger eggs than expected for their body size. One thing is we already mentioned that deep sea snailfishes tend to be non-scaled on their skin. So these snailfishes also, they don't have scales and they have this large layer of gelatinous mucus covering the body, which is thought to serve several functions. It helps them grow. It helps them move easily.
They also have a non-closed skull, like there's a gap in their skull structure. And this may be an adaptation to the pressure environment to help balance pressure inside and outside the skull. All right, keep your head from exploding, gotcha. Or imploding, yeah. And flexible bones, this is another thing. Instead of rigid ossified bones, the Mariana snailfish have thin bones made primarily of cartilage.
And these flexible sort of non-bones may also help the fish withstand pressure. And this cartilage bone system is caused by a mutation in one of their bone protein genes, which seems to result in early termination of the calcification of cartilage. Hmm.
So overall, fascinating organism, but it brought me back to a question I know we've talked about on the show before. So, you know, apologies, old time listeners for coming back to familiar territory. But I couldn't help but think how so many of the body forms that we see as scary organisms.
are a result of the kind of environment in which we live and the predators you find there. You know, so like when we try to think of what a scary monster would look like, often we think of the kinds of animals you could easily imagine eating a human being. So, you know, it's going to be something with sharp teeth and big claws, that sort of thing. And so I'm wondering which types of adaptations
adaptations and body forms you would come to see as those defining, you know, a frightening anatomy or monster hood. If you were a prey organism in one of these deep sea trenches, would it be, you know, like the hole in the skull or the thin bones of the,
The thin skin that you can see through the gelatinous coating of slime on the body, the broad pectoral fins, like what would be the scary things to the organisms down there? Because it's got to be something that looks like these these critters. Yeah, something with no exoskeleton.
disgusting horrifying look at that pink flesh you can see its guts i mean that'd be pretty horrifying for us as well but well gut stuffed in cellophane doesn't seem threatening it just looks like it's like icky it's like you don't want to touch it but it doesn't seem like it's going to hurt you maybe if it were big enough i don't know i guess size is always going to be a major part of the the monsterhood equation yeah uh but oh man uh what what what a beauty
All right. Well, at last, I would like to turn our attention to one of the most iconic fish of the deep sea, the deep sea anglerfish, a true superstar. This become the poster fish for the deep and even pops up in such animated films as Finding Nemo, pops up, of course, on SpongeBob SquarePants. And as we this was the fish I was referencing earlier, when you think of deep sea fish, you probably think of a handful of
of illustrations of deep sea fish. I used to have a post when I was a kid, I had a poster for out of it, like a national geographic that had a bunch of these illustrations. And I was always captivated by several of like the, the needle toothed variety of deep sea fish. And the angler fish is definitely one of the more alarming looking, you know, it has that,
frog-like face, sharp teeth, and then, of course, this bizarre bioluminescent lure that hangs in front of its face and encourages its prey to move in and check out the light, only to be sucked into this fierce maw. I assume that's where the name of it comes from, because it's sort of like a fishing pole. Yeah, yeah, they're fisher fish. Yeah, that's why.
So when we talk about anglerfish in general, we're talking about multiple species of the teleost order Lophiformes. Anglerfish in general live in deeper waters, though there are some Lophiformes species that live in shallower waters as well. We previously discussed some shallow water frogfishes in our episodes about the Sargasso Sea concerning an ecosystem right near the surface of the water. Mm-hmm.
All told, when we're talking about anglerfish, we have sea toads, we have brightly colored frogfishes, and we have batfishes, we have goosefishes, and more. They're all ambush predators of one sort or another. They'll also all do a little bit of scavenging. They're not too proud. Some hunt on the seafloor, others in midwater, or again, even near the surface.
Now, why all the, like, frog and toad? Why are we invoking these terrestrial organisms in particular? Well, they tend to have frog-like heads due to their broad mouths, which they use in suction feeding, which is something you see in a lot of sea organisms. In order to swallow something, what do you do? You just suck it in. You just, you know, create that vacuum and just take in a portion of water that has an organism in it, and you consume it whole.
But again, here we're talking about deep-sea varieties of the anglerfish, found in tropical to temperate latitudes at depths of 2,500 meters or 8,200 feet. So at their deepest, they get down to the bathy pelagic zone, the midnight zone, which is plenty deep, a lightless realm of pressure and chilling waters.
Now, you asked about their name and their lures. Yeah, anglers are, of course, known for their lures. They are, again, the fishermen fish of the sea. Some seafloor anglers have a frilly but non-bioluminescent lure, sometimes said to resemble a worm. And then batfishes actually release a bait chemical from their lures in order to bring in prey. But the deep-sea anglerfish are best known for their glow.
Morphologically, the lure or even lures can vary greatly. So what we're talking about here is generally the first dorsal fin spine has modified. It's evolved into a long wiggling rod, an elysium. And again, they can wiggle it so they can actively move it to help bring in the prey. And then there's a lure at the end of the elysium called the esca.
And in bioluminescent anglerfish, the ESCA is a sack of glowing bacteria. Chef's kiss. Yes. So these are symbiotic photobacteria. The symbiotic relationship here is that, of course, the anglerfish uses the light to draw in prey, right?
And in return, the photobacteria get to live in a little fleshy knob at the end of this protrusion on the fish's head, which I know doesn't sound very attractive to most of us. But if you are a photobacterium, this is advantageous because you get to live with a whole bunch
of your fellow photobacteriums by the millions inside of this lure, and you get to see the world, baby. Maybe not all the world, but you get to travel around. It takes you places. So it's a mutualistic form of symbiosis. Exactly. Both parties benefit. Yeah. Yeah. Now, one of the big questions that scientists have puzzled over for years is, well, how did the fish first acquire the bacteria?
And scientists have largely been unsure whether this is a situation where a developing anglerfish would encounter the bacteria in the open ocean or if they were inoculated with them by a parent during spawning, you know, or in some way like it's passed on parent to offspring.
Now, most of the recent research I was looking at does seem to point more towards the idea that they acquire the photobacteria in the open ocean. And it's also worth noting that the anglerfish do have specific species of bacteria that they pair with. And when you get into some of the other details, you can see how you could potentially lean one way or another in trying to figure out where they get this stuff.
Because on one hand, young female anglerfish apparently don't seem to yet have room for the bacteria in that little knob, in the esca. Also, as Baker et al. reported in 2019's Diverse Deep Sea Anglerfishes Share a Genetically Reduced Luminous Symbiote that is acquired from the environment. This was published in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology. They point out that if the bacteria were transferred parent to young fish,
then we would be able to observe it in the bacteria DNA. There would be this sort of lineage of co-evolution, and we don't see the telltale markers of that with the anglerfish and their specific bacteria. So it seems to be a more kind of capture and cultivate kind of situation. Right.
Now, on the other hand, the reduced genome of these particular bacteria species seem to indicate that they've lost the ability to exist separately from their host fish. This is something, of course, we see in such symbiotic relationships in nature as, say, the leafcutter ants who have their own fungus that has essentially become extinct in the wild because it's a domesticated species.
And so on one hand, given that it seems like these bacteria species have lost the ability to exist without the anglerfish, well, then maybe it's something that's passed on initially from parent to offspring, because otherwise, how could it live free out there in the water? However,
And other studies have added different wrinkles to this by pointing out, well, okay, maybe there are examples. And it seems like there are examples of free-floating symbionts of the angler's photobacteria, at least in some cases. So based on what I've read here and elsewhere, it sounds like the current wisdom on the topic drifts somewhat towards the acquired in the wild argument, but with some possible shades of the parent transfer theory as well. Yeah.
Perhaps they pick up the bacteria from an environmental population that is supplied by symbionts ejected from adult anglerfish. Now, I'm not sure if they're ejected at some point during the fish's life or at death, but the idea here would be that perhaps the bacteria live the majority of their life within the anglerfish, within that fleshy knob in the escha. But then at some point,
They're going to escape or they're going to be released. And it's when they're free living, that's when they're picked up by other anglerfish. The Eska, by the way, does have a pore on it that seems to be the likely exit entry point in question. So it's not completely sealed. There does seem to be like a hatch to go in and out of.
I should also add that the exact findings on all this, it may depend on which specific anglerfish species and corresponding bacteria species you're looking at. But again, things in general do seem to tip toward the acquired in the wild model. However they get their glow, they definitely use it, drawing in hungry or perhaps mate-seeking prey that the anglers then suck and gobble into their large mouths.
We already mentioned that, you know, it's good to have a large belly in addition to a large mouth in the deep because, again, you don't know when you're going to get your next meal. And in the case of the anglerfish specifically, this means they can also kind of take in oversized prey. They've got the big mouth and they've got the big belly. So they're really here for it. They're going to clean house anytime there's an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Also, those teeth, those noticeable teeth of the anglerfish, they can depress the teeth at will to allow unobstructed travel down their throat. And they can likewise raise them again like the bars of a cage to prevent engulfed prey from escaping again. That is horrifying. Yeah. So, like, the teeth—wow. Yeah.
So when it's trying to get its mouth around something that's just too big to get past the teeth, the teeth come down, but then they close again. Yeah. It's like what big teeth you have grandma to bite me with. No, to trap you with, to keep you from escaping. Let me, let me get these out of the way so I can get in there.
I should also note that the light on the end of the lure, it has a kind of lid, a kind of like flap of skin that can muscularly hide or reveal the glow. And I guess we might think of it almost like an eyelid or something. ♪
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The female is larger and fiercer by a considerable margin in these species. And the male's main purpose is to provide sperm for sexual reproduction. So for black sea devils, for example, there are like five species of black sea devil. The male is free swimming, but doesn't even feed as an adult. In other species, the male is small and pancreatic.
parasitic in nature. So what it does is, and in general, the males, again, they're small. They often have like oversized sense organs. And they are basically like heat-seeking little missiles. Their one goal in life is to find the female, which, you know, this matches up with other modes of sexual reproduction we see in the animal kingdom. But when they get there,
Some of them, particularly like these black sea devils, they will attach to the female's body. They will latch on and they will fuse with her body. Almost blurring the line between like the male adult itself and like the germ cells. Like it's almost like an infection. Like, let me become part of your body. Let us share a circulatory system because that is exactly what happens here.
there is a merging, there is a fusing of the male and female, and in some cases, multiple males. The female will have multiple males attached to her. Joe, if you slide down in our notes here, I included an image here, and you can really see, I mean, when I say
there's a difference in size here. It is extreme. The female here looks like she just has, you could mistake this for just like a little flourish on the creature's back, but that is a male that is fused with her. It would be like, I don't know. It's like a mole. Yeah, yeah. It'd be like you have a male creature
if the male human being was the size of a squirrel, you know, compared to the female. Like, that's how small he is. But wait, does she have two males stuck to her? Is there another one on her face? Or is that the lure? That may be a lure. I'm not completely certain on that. But indeed, yeah, females will end up with multiple males. And
And the males continue to live, but they become entirely dependent on the female for nutrients. They don't feed. They're just latched on. They are essentially part of her body.
The upside for her is they don't take up much space. They're small. And they also require comparably little nourishment, so they're not too much of a drain. And they're just there ready to provide sperm whenever she is ready to reproduce. Again, this comes down to the idea that in these deep waters, you may have trouble running into prey. And when you do, you need to be able to be ready to eat them entirely, eat as much as you can.
And likewise, it's going to be hard to find a mate. So when you find one, you better be ready to fuse with her body and or if you're the female, you need to go ahead and attach them to you and carry them with you so you can use them later. It's a brilliant adaptation. Perfect. It is. It's amazing. And it's
By the way, the reproduction is still carried out externally via spawning. So the females release eggs, the males release sperm, and then the fertilized eggs drift off in the water column. The male is right there. He's stuck to her. Yeah. Yeah. He's just right there, right there on the hull of the ship.
I mean, there's a lot crazy about this. Again, this is about as far from the human model of sexual reproduction as you can get. And it certainly gets into like certainly body horror realms when you start imagining like human versions of this. But one of the crazy things about the merging here is that we're dealing with genetically disparate male and female counterparts. And yet they're able to fuse together without invoking a strong anti-graft immune rejection response, let's say, on the part of the female.
This is what you generally see in cases of parabiosis, particularly of the surgical variety. In pretty much all other vertebrates, any kind of grafting like this, limb transplant, organ transplant, tissue transplant, depending exactly on what you're transplanting. When you get down into bones, it's a little different. But generally, you're going to generate an immune system response,
resulting in the rejection of the grafted tissue unless immunosuppressant medications are employed, or I know in the case of some organ transplants, you'll have bone marrow transplants that are sometimes employed to reduce rejection.
You're saying the anglerfish immune systems do not do this. They can have the male graft right on there and the immune system does not reject it. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, like this, we have to jump through so many hoops to to actually successfully transplant tissues, limbs and so forth with with our human bodies. And with anglerfish, they just do it as part of their sexual reproduction.
And so this has been a major point of fascination for scientists. I was reading an article from 2022 that gets into some of this, titled Histocompatibility and Reproduction Lessons from the Anglerfish by Noah Isikoff in the journal Life.
And they point out that it's thought that anglerfish evolved to, quote, tolerate the histo-incompatible tissue antigens of their mate and prevent the occurrence of reciprocal graft rejection responses. And so they likely, this is where it gets interesting, this doesn't mean that they just like flipped off all defenses and they're like, well, we don't care about infections now because we need a breed. It's likely, the author points out, that they evolved
other immune strategies to protect against, uh, to protect against the sorts of infections and threats that those very defense systems would otherwise be in place for. So they're arguing there's, you know, that obviously there's so much we could learn, um, you know, from these fish to, you know, better, uh, you know, to, to better understand how, for instance, uh,
on one hand, how we might just protect against infections, like what sort of strategies are they using that are different from what we see in other organisms? And then, of course, the obvious ramification here is what if we could learn from them to improve human tissue limb and organ transplants? Those are the potential, quote, lessons from the anglerfish.
Now, Joe, I only shared like one, maybe two pictures of anglerfish in our document, but I do recommend that everyone out there just do a few image searches, look around. Anglerfish vary so much.
in their appearance and their morphology, you know, it's really wild and wonderful. And once you, especially when you get out of deep sea anglerfish and you start looking at like all of these like colorful examples you find in shallower waters, you know, there is some amazing diversity here.
Well, you know, it's funny. We were just talking about how ecology affects aesthetic values, you know, in terms of like what looks scary to us is affected by the animals that we're afraid could harm us. And if you, you know, you're a prey animal in the Mariano Trench, would what looks scary to you be these cute little animals?
snailfishes. I think we have to ask the same question about the biology underlying aesthetics. If you were a highly evolved anglerfish species, what looks sexy to you? Interesting question looking either way at the anglerfish sexes. Yeah, I mean, if you're a female anglerfish, you're really looking for a guy who no longer eats and is really ready to change for you.
Trying to imagine the cosmetic trends of anglerfish that evolve technological intelligence. What would they be doing to try to enhance the look of the jailbar teeth? Would they be messing with the lure somehow? Yeah, yeah. Some of them have kind of like a beard going on that is also bioluminescent. So they might be wanting a more robust, glowing beard. You know, that's certainly advisable.
These are wonderful creatures. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, they're horrifying, but they're also, they are attractive in their own way. I was just doing a quick image search, and I'm running across tattoos that people have of anglerfish. So they have their own vibe going on that definitely people love.
All right. We're going to go and close up this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. We were just chatting off mic, and we think we're probably going to come back and do one more episode, but we're going to leave it a little open. High likelihood that you're going to get another episode on deep sea predators, and it will also be gross and amazing and weird. But if not, we'll come back with something else.
In the meantime, we'd like to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on various social media accounts. I can't keep track of what's going on with social media these days. But we're on some of them, and you can follow us. I know we're on Instagram, where we are stbynpodcasts.
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
♪
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