A scientific team from Australia and Japan filmed and captured the fish at a record depth of more than eight kilometers below the sea surface. “Terchos are great, amazing. Most of the fish from this family live in very shallow waters,” marveled the leader of the expedition, Alan Jamieson.
0:50
Scientists managed to film fish at a record depth. They were surprised what they were. | Video: Reuters
The expedition, part of a 10-year investigation into the deepest fish population on the planet, spent two months in the sea off southern Japan, surveying the seabed using remote-controlled cameras. They caught a species of fish from the target fish family floating at a depth of 8,336 meters in the Boninské trench.
“The Japanese trenches were an incredible place to explore, they are so rich with life, even down to the very bottom,” said Alan Jamieson of the University of Western Australia, who collaborated with the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology on the research.
Jamieson confirmed that the team caught two fish of the species Pseudoliparis belyaevi in traps set at a depth of 8022 meters in the Japan Trench. These are the first fish caught more than eight kilometers below sea level.
Cameras launched from the DSSV Pressure Drop research vessel then recorded an unspecified species of fish from the tarsier family floating more than 300 meters deeper in the Bonin Trench. “Terchovidae are great, amazing. Most fish from this family live in very shallow waters. Some of them are even in estuaries, so we don’t consider them deep-sea fish. But they have spread to all corners of the world and overtaken all deep-sea fish,” says the scientist .
“We don’t appreciate the fact that it (the deep sea) is basically the majority of planet Earth and that resources should be put into understanding it and finding out how we affect it and how it works,” Jamieson added.
