So instead of having a suicidal swim bladder, the blobfish is made up of gelatinous flesh. Such an air-filled organ, however, would collapse under extreme pressure, blowing the fish to bits. You see, most fish have an organ called a swim bladder, which allows them to float and swim. Now, why would it be like that? It’s actually one of the blobfish adaptations. It is simply made up of a jelly-like substance. Why does it change so drastically? It’s because the blobfish has no skeleton and no real muscles. Let’s take a closer look at the blobfish’s transformation. It can be found off the coasts of mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. The blobfish, in particular, lives at depths of up to 3900 feet (1189 meters) where the normal pressure is about 118 times higher than that at sea level. They like to live where the water is cold, after all. Not much is known about the Pyschrolutidae family except that they have large heads, live on the ocean floor and that their family name comes from the Greek word psychrolouteo, which means “to have a cold bath”. Its scientific name is Psychrolutes marcidus, which means it belongs to a family of fish known as fatheads - you could say ugliness is in the blobfish’s blood. It might look like something out of a fantasy or horror film, but it is a real fish. After all, who calls a fish a blob? It sounds like a poor joke, right? Then again, the dumbo octopus, the vampire squid, the chicken turtle and the Christmas tree worm are all real, which just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge an animal by its weird name - or that it isn’t always easy for scientists to come up with a unique animal name. The first time you hear the word “blobfish”, you might doubt whether it’s real. To comment on this video – visit youtube. Why is it considered so ugly? And what else is there to this mysterious, miserable-looking creature? Is it a freak of nature, or a wonder of nature? Let’s find out. If you have, it’s probably because it was chosen as the world’s ugliest animal in 2013, beating other bizarre creatures such as the axolotl, the naked mole rat, the purple frog and the proboscis monkey. You might have heard of it, or you might not. Luckily, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority has closed some of their habitat to fishing, so hopefully there’ll be less blobfish bycatch in the future.Blobfish - 10 Facts about the Kings and Queens of Ugly… by IP Factly When they are inadvertently caught, they’re known as bycatch, and it’s a huge problem for many other non-food species of fish as well. Fisherman use trawlers to catch deep-sea delicacies like orange roughy and crustaceans in their native environment, and sometimes blobfish just happen to get swept into these nets, too. Nevertheless, scientists think that these interesting fish are declining due to fishing activity. It’s likely that no one really knows how many blobfish there are. They’re also very hard to find (how likely are you really to come across a blobfish in your adventures?), and not very photogenic, unlike red wolves or whooping cranes. No one is crowding into expensive restaurants asking for the Blob of the Day. It’s difficult to get good population numbers on the blobfish because it’s not a very important species economically. The same thing happens with the blobfish, minus the pool and lots of people part. Imagine putting a water balloon in a pool full of people: it would just kind of float along across the bottom of the pool. Its body composition gives it just the right buoyancy to float along across the bottom of the sea without having to expend much effort. In fact, the blobfish looks very different when in its natural environment at the bottom of the sea-it appears much more compressed and fish-like (but still quite odd-looking, even for a fish).īeing a gelatinous blob also helps the blobfish with its coach-potato attitude. This is an advantage in the crushing depths where it lives by being made out of gelatinous, blobby material, the blobfish can keep itself from being crushed due to water pressure. Most of its body mass is gelatinous, and it has very few hard bones. You might think that being a blob would be a disadvantage, but for the blobfish lifestyle, it actually helps. They tend to float along, just off the bottom of the sea, eating whatever happens to float right in front of them and is small enough to fit into their mouths. At depths of 2,000 feet or greater, the water pressure is crushing-more than 60 times that of water at the surface! If you lived down that deep, you’d probably be squished into a blob, too.įortunately for the blobfish, they’ve adopted a way of living that allows them to survive just fine as a blob in the deep ocean. Blobfish live in deep water just off the ocean floor around southeastern Australia and Tasmania. As it turns out, the blobfish has good reason to be so ugly: its habitat shaped it that way.
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