A visitor to Crystal Cove State Park in Southern California noticed an unusual sight last Friday: a dead deep-sea anglerfish that looked like something out of a nightmare.
“To see an actual angler fish is very rare, and it is unknown how or why the fish ended up on the shore,” the park’s official Facebook account noted in a post about the sighting.
There are more than 200 species of anglerfish worldwide. The one that washed up at Crystal Cove was most likely a Pacific football fish, and typically, this species would live in waters that never see the light of day, between 2,200 and 3,300 feet, according to the California Academy of Sciences.
The park was able to identify the fish as a female one, as "only females possess a long stalk on the head with bioluminescent tips used as a lure to entice prey in the darkness of waters as deep as 3,000 feet!" The post continued: "Their teeth, like pointed shards of glass, are transparent and their large mouth is capable of sucking up and swallowing prey the size of their own body."
In an extreme example of sexual dimorphism, however, males are typically only 1 inch long. Male Pacific football fish become “sexual parasites,” where they eventually become part of the female fish itself. In the process, they lose their eyes, internal organs and everything else but the testes, “and serve as an easily accessible source of sperm,” Cal Academy explained on its website. The San Francisco museum has its own specimen in its collections, a Pacific football fish that was caught by fishers in Monterey Bay in 1985.
“Seeing this strange and fascinating fish is a testament to the diversity of marine life lurking below the water’s surface in California’s MPAs and as scientists continue to learn more about these deep sea creatures,” Crystal Cove State Park concluded, “it’s important to reflect on how much is still to be learned from our wonderful ocean.”
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May 12, 2021 at 05:57AM
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‘Strange and fascinating’ deep-sea fish washes up on Calif. beach - SF Gate
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