A team of scientists from Australia and Japan managed to discover the deepest fish ever recorded in the ocean using a camera and some bait. The team photographed an unknown species of snail of the genus Pseudoliparis at a depth of 27,349 feet below the ocean surface. The team embarked on a two-month expedition in August 2022 to explore three deep trenches in the North Pacific. Operations were conducted in Ryukyu Trench, Japan Trench and Izu-Ogasawara Trench. The study was conducted on deep-sea fish populations over 10 years.
The tiny fish was caught on camera in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench in southern Japan. The Mariana snail was found in 2017 at a depth of 26,830 feet in the Mariana Trench. A few days later, the team collected two fish at a depth of 26,318 meters in the Japan Trench.
Alan Jamieson, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia, discovered the previous record in 2017 and said, “The Japanese trenches were a pretty good place to explore. It’s really amazing that these fish can survive at such great depths.” In other trenches, such as the Mariana Trench, these snails have also been found at increasingly greater depths. But their population is even higher around Japan.
Despite the large and “somewhat vibrant” population of fish living at these depths, the researchers found juveniles of the Pseudoliparis species. Most juvenile snailfish are usually found living at greater depths than adults. However, in other deep-sea fishes, the opposite picture is observed. Jamieson explained that this may be to avoid predation by larger fish. As you go down to a depth of 8,000 meters or 26,000 feet, the fish will continue to get smaller. Many of their fish will look very small.