Watch the Deepest Fish Ever Observed in the Ocean

Scientists have recorded a fish swimming about more than five miles under the ocean surface, making it the deepest fish ever caught on film. The footage of the animal, which belongs to the snailfish genus Pseudoliparis, was captured by an autonomous deep sea vessel that was exploring the Izu-Ogasawara trench, located south-east of Japan.

The newly observed snailfish beats out the previous record-holder, another species of snailfish observed in the Mariana Trench in 2017, by about 518 feet. Pressures at these extreme depths are about 800 times more intense than at Earth’s surface, making these environments extremely difficult to inhabit for most animals. Snailfish have managed to survive in these remote dark seafloors because of their gelatinous bodies and diet of bottom-dwelling crustaceans, among other adaptations. 

The captivating video of the snailfish was captured by a collaboration between the Minderoo-University of Western Australia (UWA) Deep Sea Research Centre and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. Alan Jamieson, a deep-sea scientist at UWA who led the expedition and also discovered the previous record-holder, believes this new dizzying depth may be the lower limit for fish in the oceans.

"If this record is broken, it would only be by minute increments, potentially by just a few meters," Jamieson told BBC News.

“We have spent over 15 years researching these deep snailfish; there is so much more to them than simply the depth, but the maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing,” he also noted in a UWA statement.