When most people think of deep-sea creatures, they imagine monsters. Anglerfish with dangling lures, eerie translucent skin, and a mouth filled with sharp jagged teeth jutting out in odd, disconcerting angles. But now and then, something soft, squishy, and adorable crawls out of the abyss. This time, it’s the bumpy snailfish.
Discovered over 10,000 feet below the surface off Central California, the bumpy snailfish is one of three new species found during a 2019 deep-sea expedition led by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. We’re only hearing about it now that the researchers have published their study in the journal Ichthyology & Herpetology.
Led by the study’s co-author, marine biologist Mackenzie Gerringer, scientists sent down a pair of high-tech submersibles nicknamed Alvin and Doc (human-operated and robotic, respectively) to the unexplored reaches of the Monterey Canyon. The mission was to travel deeper than anyone usually bothers to poke around and get a general sense of what was going on down there.
They found the bumpy snailfish, which is roughly the size of a human hand, with big eyes, a round pink head, and a smile.
Meet the Brand-New Fish Species That’s Cute as Heck
It’s got the kind of pleasant and inviting face that you usually see drawn onto huggable animated characters. It looks like a pink-hued Squirtle.
“It’s pretty adorable,” Gerringer told the New York Times.
Snailfish aren’t a new discovery. They’ve been found in a few spots around the world, like the Mariana Trench. That one in particular holds the record for the deepest living fish, finding a home at 27,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. T
here are 450 known species, many of which were discovered in just the past 20 years, when submersible technologies became strong enough to survive such deep-sea plunges into their homes. They’re small, have no scales, and their bellies are covered in a jelly-like substance that helps them stick to rocks or even other, larger fish.
Their gelatinous transparent bodies (that are sometimes bioluminescent) allow them to live under pressures of 15,000 psi, in frigid temperatures, in the dark. While all of those factors usually combine to create a deep-sea demon that deserves a spear gun bolt to the brain, you wouldn’t dream of doing that to the sailfish, because as ecologist Johanna Weston told the New York Times, they come in beautiful colors… “They also have a lovely little smile on their face.”
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