The Oceanlab’s HADEEP project - a joint research initiative between the universities of Aberdeen and Tokyo - has caught on camera what's believed to be the world's deepest living species of fish.
The footage is the first to be captured at a depth of 7,700 metres, and was filmed using deep-sea equipment designed to withstand 8,000 tonnes of pressure per square metre - that's the equivalent of 1,600 elephants standing on the roof of a Mini car, says the Natural Environment Research Council.
The camera equipment took five hours to be lowered to the Japan Trench in the floor of the northern Pacific Ocean, and it remained submersed for two days before surfacing. The end result is stunning footage of Hadal snailfish, the deepest living species that lives in complete darkness at near-freezing temperatures:
Professor Monty Priede, director of Oceanlab, said:
It’s incredible. These videos vastly exceed all our expectations from this research. We thought the deepest fishes would be motionless, solitary, fragile individuals eking out an existence in a food-sparse environment.
But these fish aren’t loners. The images show groups that are sociable and active – possibly even families – feeding on little shrimp, yet living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.
All we’ve seen before of life at this depth have been shrivelled specimens in museums. Now we have an impression of how they move and what they do. Having seen them moving so fast, snailfish seems a complete misnomer.
The team has been keeping a blog of its expedition, and further details can be found at planetearth.nerc.ac.uk.
