Close-up of the deepest living fish in the ocean ever recorded by camera

On 2-4, a video of snailfish at a depth of 8,336m on the seabed was released by scientists at the University of Western Australia and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. The footage was filmed by a scuba diving robot in deep trenches off the coast of Japan, in the northern Pacific Ocean in September 2022.

This is the deepest living fish on the seabed ever recorded. University of Western Australia deep-sea scientist, Professor Alan Jamieson, said that if this record is broken, it is likely that the depth will only increase by a few meters.

Previously, this record was confirmed in the Mariana Trench at a depth of 8,178m.

At the Izu-Ogasawara Trench near Japan, scientists dropped an automated camera to what they estimated was the maximum depth the fish could survive and filmed the snailfish.

Snails belong to the group of multicellular organisms, identified as Pseudoliparis belyaevi. So far, scientists have not collected specimens to fully identify this species, but they have caught some fish at a slightly higher level.

Previously, the record for the deepest living fish was set by the Mariana snailfish, which was discovered by scientists in the Mariana Trench in 2014. The snailfish lives in the deepest part of the ocean, called the hadal zone, where there is a depth of 6,000 to 11,000 meters, where no light can reach the place, called the dark sea.

Professor Jamieson speculates that, because the waters of the Izu-Ogasawara are slightly warmer than the Mariana Trench, the fish could have survived at that depth.

Micah Soto

Update 07 April 2023