Messenger from the deep

I couldn’t react immediately. The glut of poetic reactions to the deep-sea anglerfish appearing in shallow waters off the Canary Islands caught the world by surprise. You can see the pictures here or anywhere across the Internet. This was the first surface level view of an adult abyssal humpback anglerfish.

The pictures create more questions than answers. A fish that lives and dreams in total darkness, the only light it knows is self-generated. On its head, a bioluminescent bulb on a ray draws prey to its mouth of needle-like teeth. Symbiotic bacteria generate the light. We can confirm she was a female, because only the females have the lighted lure. 

They can live more than a mile below the surface, two miles below my elevation. Sunlight only penetrates to depths of 200 meters; plant life cannot survive below that level because there isn’t enough light for photosynthesis. So these small fish are rulers of the dark, their offering of light not an olive branch to other species, but a way to hunt and stay alive. 

In the photos she looked giant. She measured out at six centimeters long. Hardly the nightmare fish those zoomed-in photos depicted or heavily adapted for Finding Nemo. The pictures portray her as big as an ocean sunfish, but a shot of the filming diver reveals the truth. 

I’m sure it isn’t the first anglerfish to die where light reaches, just the first humans have recorded. They have ended up in fishing nets, but none have been seen free-swimming like this before. The anglerfish was in poor condition and did not survive long, the biologists reported.

There’s sadness to the appearance. These creatures live their whole lives in the dark, but this one didn’t.Whenever you spot animals at normally night active during the day, a problem exists. A raccoon or opossum in daylight usually has health issues. I suspect that when an anglerfish rises into daylight, something must be off. 

Illness, chase from a predator, or an unexpected ocean current could have forced the fatal drive to the surface, which likely took the fish several days. any number of occurrences could have launched its last ascent. 

We’ll never know what drove it from the dark, to waters where the light must have been blinding. Still,  we can still be humbled by a tiny predator that shares a planet with us, yet occupies a wholly different world a mile below the ocean surface.