Milly: Ugly Fish pt 9

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 1

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 2

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 3

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 4

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 5

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 6

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 7

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 8

"Here you are" said Alan, all blasé, as he passed me something he had picked out of the trawl net. It looked like a dead hand on the end of a stick and smelt like one too; I didn't have a clue what I was looking at. The more learned scientists told me it was a stalked crinoid, a sea lilly, part of the Phylum Echinodermata, so related to starfish, sea cucumbers and sea urchins. As I looked closer I realised that it was much more attractive than a decomposing fist, with many intricate feathery arms that I imagined would actually look quite nice when underwater.

Having a gander at the feeding arms of the crinoid, note the long
stalk in the background, these can be 1 metre long! Image: Zan

Close up of the main body of the crinoid
showing the stem leading to the calyx
and then the feeding arms at the end.
Image: Zan

Another species of deep-sea stalked crinoid called Moulin Rouge
(Proisocrinus ruberrimus) photographed on the sea floor. Pretty sexy, for a crinoid.
Image: National History Museum

These fascinating creatures look like plants (hence the name 'sea lily') but have the features of animals such as a basic gut, a simple nervous system and a fully functional circulatory system that transports nutrients, gases and waste products around the body. The many feathery arms found near the mouth (and also unfortunately the anus) are used to filter out small particles in the water where it is trapped in sticky secreted mucus and pushed into the mouth.

They are sometimes referred to as 'living fossils' as they seem to remain relatively unchanged morphologically since their radiation during the Paleozoic Era (about 550-250 million years ago).

A fossil stalked crinoid,
looks a lot like the modern version.
Image: web

Shallow water crinoids are often free-swimming, and crinoids with long stalks, such as the one from our trawl, are usually found at depth, anchored to the ocean floor (ours was found at about 4500m). I say anchored...but scientists recently observed sea lilies up-rooting and crawling along the sediment, seems there is yet more to be discovered about these strange animals....

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 8

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 1
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 2
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 3
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 4
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 5
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 6
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 7

Coming back to my post about pressure (pt 6), how are deep sea animals adapted to survive at depth?

As there are all sorts of animals currently inhabiting the deep, I'll concentrate on fish. Fish are the best anyway. Slightly biased.

Well the problem is, fish don't just have to cope with the crushing pressure (up to 800x greater than at the surface) but the deep is also very dark (beyond 1000m there is negligible surface light) and cold (2°C) making things such as moving around, finding food and reproducing much more challenging. Let's have a look at a few fish and see how they do it. Enter handsome fellow number one, the anglerfish.

Whipnose anglerfish, about the size of a football.
Note the long lure with the tiny esca on the end, capable of bioluminescing.
Image: Dianne Bray

A selection of anglers.
Image: Dr Theodore W. Pietsch and Christopher P. Kenaley

There are 11 families of deep sea anglerfish, some only containing one species, such as the lonely prickly seadevil, Centrophryne spinulosa (Centrophrynidae family) others have many more such as the footballfish, Himantolophidae with 19 species. They are a surprisingly diverse group of ugly fish. As you can see from the pictures above, these animals don't look particularly athletic. If you were to design an animal for a race underwater I doubt 'round' would be the shape you would go for. Nevertheless, these are very successful bathypelagic (1000 - 4000m) animals, but why? Anglerfish are sit and wait predators and with the aid of their bioluminescent lure, can draw in prey such as fish and cephalopods (squid etc) within gobbling distance. The bioluminescent light, which can be controlled producing flashes or sustained glowing is the product of many bioluminescent bacteria that colonise the lure (or esca). They don't even need to feed particularly often since they expend such little energy, evident when you touch one of these animals. Their bodies are both flabby and bony (an attractive combination) suggesting they do very little excercise. Lazy little anglerfish. Not only are they lazy but seriously greedy. An expandable stomach allows anglerfish to munch down prey twice their size. A human man could fulfil his daily allowance of calories with 850g of meat, less than the weight of a mature trout! Seriously rubbish in comparison. 

Sea devil (Melanocetus niger), about the size of a
golf ball, look at that mouth! Image: Milly Sharkey

A female angler with the tiny parasitic male attached.
Image: Dr Theodore W. Pietsch. University of Washington

One problem that could arise, being a voracious predator in the dark munching on anything that moves, is that you might accidentally eat your mate. Finding a mate in the dark expanse of the deep sea is likely to be a very rare event. Some anglers have evolved a bizarre strategy whereby the male does not develop fully, is unable to feed properly and has enhanced olfactory senses (smell). This spurs the male on to quickly find a female before he starves, detecting the pheromones she expels into the water. When they do meet, the male bites the female, releasing enzymes that break down the skin between them, causing the two to fuse. The lucky male is now parasitic and no longer requires digestive organs, brain or his own heart (I told you they were lazy), obtaining everything he needs from the female. In return, he provides her with sperm from his last remaining organ, his gonads, a perfect relationship some may say. Bit clingy, plus he's a bit screwed...sorry I'll stop now.

More later, I need to locate pre-trawl pudding.

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 7

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 1
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 2
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 3
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 4
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 5
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 6

Always dark on the night shift... Image: web

Prepare to commence trawl two. When you have been on a night shift from 4pm to 4am and a trawl is due to hit the deck at 2am, chances are your body clock is going to be a tad confused. Last time I nearly fell asleep in my fish dissection, started writing backwards and couldn’t retain a two digit number in my head for more than 1millisecond. Not doing that again. New tactic! Since I had allocated rest time before the trawl... I decided to stay awake for 28 hours before the trawl, have a sleep then be all fresh and ready for action once the slimy catch was brought aboard. Problem with that is staying awake for 28 hours with absolutely nothing to do tends to send you a bit West. I became inaudible, talking at extremely low baritone frequencies if you can even call it talking, more like incoherent blatherings. The day shift tolerated me well. The rewards were great however, and this time, we were super fish team extraordinaire (well, we functioned without any breakdowns anyhow).




Much like last time, the trawl net was opened (noticeably more rotund this time, a good sign) and catch was spilled into a large bucket ready for inspection. Unfortunately on the last trawl we managed to scoop up a large amount of clinker (burnt coal from steam ships of the past) which made sorting through the cucumbers and delicately removing gelatinous fish nigh impossible. This time, we had little ocean floor debris so I zealously sunk my arms into the cold, slippery assortment of fish, cucumbers and crustaceans and pulled out a big, heavy object. “Oh wow, an exciting find" I thought to myself. “Doesn’t feel like a cucumber, maybe it is a big leathery fish, woohoo!" It was a shoe, a big, woman’s boot. I then proceeded to dig out two bottles and a rock. Thankfully Alan and Juliette were being slightly more sensible and actually searching for fish shaped objects and so commenced a slithery extraction of rattails, smooth-heads, some unfortunate midwater fish and a huge cusk-eel.

Is it a fish?! Is it a holothuriuan?! No. It's a bloody shoe.

Histiobranchus sp., a deep sea eel. Image: Zan 

Cusk-eel! Image: Zan 

 Lovely cusk-eel (Ophidiid). Image: Nina

We had fewer fish this time round, but they were all in really great condition, great for samples we thought, but then memories of hours in the dark surfaced in my brain and I realised that watching 3 horror films to try and stay awake was, perhaps, a terrible idea. Juliette and I managed to put aside a few minutes whilst our fish eyes were on ice to explore the trawl and the sorting process in the wet lab. It looked how I would imagine a backstreet fishmongers from a sci-fi film to look. All manner of strange beasts being weighed and measured and samples for DNA analysis being taken left right and centre. The fish were amazing. There was one fish, aptly named ‘Jellyface’ by Zan, which had a large rounded nose, a small mouth and two, what looked like sensory pits, next to the eyes. The skin on the head felt very bizarre, much like a stubbly beard. The cusk-eel felt even stranger, as you ran your fingers across its skin you felt a crackling sensation which could be due to tiny bubbles under the skin forming as the fish is brought up from depth, decompressing the air within its cells. 

'Jellyface'. Image: Zan

Juliette having a good rummage around in the cucumbers. Image: Nina

Not the most attractive of creatures.
According to one scientist this cucumber is "cute", "look at it's little hat!" she said. I later discovered this 'little hat' is in fact a parasitic anemone. The deep sea is a very strange place! Image: Nina

I had been challenged by one of my supervisors to kiss a benthic fish. Now, he may well have been joking, but I considered this something I should take very seriously and so I sought out the loveliest of all the fish in the catch, the cusk-eel and planted my lips firmly upon its slimy....mouthparts. Picture taken. Job done.

I think the picture says it all. Image: Nina

So why is all of this necessary? Larking about aside, we are taking samples for serious and important science and all possible information is always gathered from these trawls, to make the most of each catch. Stay tuned for an explanation of the science behind the sampling, most likely in the form of an interview with Juliette McGregor (she doesn't know this yet). Roll on the final trawl. Fingers crossed my supervisor doesn’t up the stakes, kissing a benthic fish is one thing, but kissing a sea cucumber, well that's a whole different level of gross.

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 4

Milly: Ugly Fish pt 1
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 2
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 3
Milly: Ugly Fish pt 5
Milly: Ugly Fish Pt 6
Milly: Ugly Fish Pt 7

Juliette and I digging about in the catch

UGLY FISH! Finally, we have a trawl! Never have I seen so many bizarre looking animals (presuming things that freakish are allowed to be classified as animals) in one place before. Once the catch was hauled on board at about 8am, safely away from the stern that was flying in the air due to the brilliantly timed bad weather, Juliette and I got the first look in (we needed to get fish into the dark asap). That lasted a matter of minutes as a riot from the sidelines began to brew. Reluctantly we brought the catch into the hangar and the feeding frenzy commenced. All scientists descended, franticly digging around in the clinker (burnt coal from back when we had steam ships) pulling out sea cucumbers the size of, well, cucumbers which, in my opinion, fell into three categories. They either looked like bloated sausages, huge purple tongues or like something from the ‘extreme’ section of Anne Summers.

Quickly trying to whisk the fish away before they get exposed
to too much light

A fangtooth, wouldn't call this fish ugly to its face

A bizzarre collection of sea cucumbers.

Scientists went into warp drive, taxonomists started identifying the hundreds of deep sea creatures, geneticists took samples from everything that and one girl Zan after weighing and measuring the fish was even examining their stomach contents. Wonderful, organised chaos.

Sorting through the cucumbers

Looks like a rather disturbing picnic spread.

One of the many crustaceans

that came up with the trawl

Selection of grenadiers

An assortment of slickheads

So in the midst of all of the excitement what were Juliette and I doing? Oh, that’s right, we were barricaded in a blacked out lab with only dim red light to guide us and each other (plus a bag of fish) for company. Since we were under time constraints to get the eyes out of the fish as soon as physically possible I grabbed the first fish out of the bag (an extraordinarily disgusting place to put your hand into, I might add) whacked it on the scales and began the first dissection. Glancing over at Juliette I was slightly worried she might have had a melt down. After the weeks of careful planning and packing, she was finally about to begin the first sample collection, in the dark, likely to take about 12 hours and her legs and arms had frozen in place. Thankfully, the roll of the ship prevented any stationary activity and team fish were off.

With every hesitant poke around in the fish bag, came more gelatinous, benthic beasties. 

About 10 hours later, sleep deprived (after switching from the night shift), stinking of fish, cross eyed and suffering from tunnel vision, Juliette and I emerged triumphant. All fish processed, retinal tissue dissected and placed carefully into various fixes to preserve cells or RNA/DNA.

Apparently there will be another trawl on Friday. God help us.

Thanks Nina and Zan for the pictures!

Success! Sleep deprivation and a very wet arse.