(In which his lordship talks at people about deep sea creatures, and is probably just looking for an excuse to post pictures of horrible deep sea mermaids)
I figure it's been long enough since the last time I've done one (about three or four months, unless I'm mistaken), so here we go again. Let's talk about freaky deep sea creatures!
What is the deep sea? Well, that should be pretty obvious. It's the part of the sea that's...deep. More precicely, deep sea is officially considered to start at around 1000 fathoms (1,8 km), below the thermocline. However, I'll also be covering the area below 200 m, as that's the point where light becomes so dim photosynthesis is no longer possible and the fish start to become weird. Up to sometime in the 1800s, it was generally assumed no complex life could live at such depth, what's with the complete lack of sunlight and immense pressure. However, life has a tendency to find a way to survive just about anywhere, and nowadays we know that while the deep sea is very sparcely populated due to lack of resources, its sheer size (it is by far the largest habitat on the planet) means it hold an enormous biodiversity. Also, significant part of this biodiversity is composed of really scary looking fish.
Also, suggested reading for people intrested in deep sea exploration, the book written by the first man to use the bathysphere to dive to the depth of half a mile and observe the life there is available for free online: archive.org/stream/halfmiledown00beeb#page/n0/mode/2up (I'm fortunate enough to own a physical copy of this book, and consider it one of my most prized possessions).
We'll start with the midwater zone, above the deep sea proper. Also known as mesopelagic, or the twilight zone (that actually is an accepted term for it among marine scientists), this is the region where there's still light, but not very much. Not enough for plants to grow but enough to see by, at least dimly. Many fish here have very large and sensitive eyes, to better see in the perpetual twilight. Many also have light organs on their underbelly, to break up their outlines when viewed againt the light filtering from above, thus hiding them from predators lurking below. Some of them migrate up and down the thermocline, following microscopic animals that rise closer to surface at night, while others remain at these depths their whole adult lives (larvae of midwater and deepwater fish live closer to surface).
James Brooks
A good example of an odd midwater fish is the barreleyy. The fish's eyes are the green orbs in the picture, while the black dots are actually its nostrils. While the fish has been known for a long time, it was only when modern submarines allowed us to observe it in its natural habitat that we learned the top of its head is covered with a transparent dome (the structure is very fragile and always broke when the fish was caught in nets). It's assume this protects the eyes from stinging cells of jellyfish and siphonophorae, allowing this fish to steal food from their tentacles. The eyes of the barreleye are tubular in shape, and point directly upward, allowing the fish to spot prey above it. The green colour of the eyes is though to tint the vision in such a way to make bioluminescent light stand out better from sunlight, negating the counter-illumination of its prey. One mystery that was also solved when observing the fish in its natural habitat has to do with the fact that its mouth is not within its field of vision. So how does it know when it's within biting range of prey? Well, it turns out the eyes just rotate in their sockets 90 degrees, letting it see where it's going!
William Peterson
Another fish with tubular eyes, this time forward-pointing, is the telescopefish (genus Gigantura). The large eyes can see even with little light and position of the eyes give it binocular vision, letting the fish gauge distance to its prey. It has very little ability to not see anything directly in front of it, though, but this is probably a worthy tradeoff. Like many deep sea fish, the telescope fish has extensible jaws and an elastic stomach, letting it swallow prey bigger than itself (the one in the picture has swallowed something quite big, as seen from the balloon-like stomach).
Samuel Green
The dragon- and viperfish are one of the many genuses in the very varied order Stomiiformes, which includes deep sea horrofish like dragonfish, stareaters and stolight loosejaw, and also bristlemouth and those perpetually terrified-looking marine hatchetfish.
Dragonfish in particular are pretty much the archeotypical serpentine sea-monsters, except tiny. They, along with viperfish, are normally found in mid- to deep waters, but can rise closer to surface during the night to feed. Both are primarily ambush predators, although capable of bursts of speed to chase prey or escape predators if necessary. Both also posess impressive jaws, as do many Stomiiformes (in fact, the name of the order comes from the Greek word for mouth, due to the huge mouths many of them have). Viperfish has teeth long enough it has specific "sheathes" for the lower jaw's teeth to slide into when it closes its mouth to keep it from accidentally stabbing its own brain with its teeth, while the dragonfish can open its jaws to almost 180 degrees, like some kind of living beartrap. This is possible to many of these fish missing one of their neck vertebrae. Not as in they have one less vertebrae in their neck than expected (well, that too), but that immediately after the skull the notochord is actually without the bony vertebra, letting the fish open its jaws in a way that would break the neck of most animals.
Jaxson Walker
A gif demonstrating the dragonfish's jaw movement. Note how the neck can bend due to lacking the bony vertebra at the base of the skull.
On an unrelated note, all but one member of Stomiiformed known produce light, and intrestingly some have at least some light-producing organs that don't function using the normal way of housing bioluminescent bacteria, but instead produce light through an enzymatic reaction.
Parker Long
The common bristlemouth is an unremarkable-looking fish that, along with the lanternfish, is by far the most populous vertebrate on the planet, with population estimated to be in at least hundreds of billions, possibly trillions. By comparison the most populous land vertebrate, the domestic chicken, has a population of about 20 billion. These small fish migrate up and down the water column to feed, and are thought to play a major role in oceanic carbon sequesteting due to the sheer amount of organic matter they move from the surface to deep waters. They are so numerous, in fact, that early sonar operators used to be baffled by what appeared to be a "false bottom" on their sonar scans, hovering several miles above the actual ocean floor and changing depth with the time of day. This illusionary bottom is caused by sound reflecting from the swimming bladders of enormous schools of bristlemouth and lanternfish.
Christian King
Moving on to deep sea proper, the bathypelagic zone, aka. midnight zone or underwater vore hell (the latter is not an actually accepted scientific term...yet) starts at the point where no light from the surface ever reaches, around 1 km down. Creatures at this depth typically have very small eyes, as there's not much for them to see, and non-streamlined bodies as they generally just float in place, waiting for food to come to them. Most are pitch-black, brown, or blood-red, to better blend in with their surroundings (red is the first spectrum of light to be absorbed by water so most deep sea fish can't even see it). Bioluminescence is common, but rather than being used for counter-illumination (no light from the surface reaches this deep, so counter-illumination is useless) it is used to attract prey.
Tyler Sullivan
Probably the best known deep sea fish fish are the deep sea anglerfish (suborder Ceratitoidei), which are actually a very diverse group of fish. Aside from the common spherical with a big toothy mouth and glowing lure at the end of a rod look, anglerfish come in various shapes and sizes. Some lack a lure entirely, or have one growing directly from the roof of their mouth. Some have long spines used to detect movement, or "beards" with bioluminescent organs in addition to the lure. In some cases the lure is actually evolved to look like a small fish (or in one species, the wolftrap angler, bizarrely enough like an actual fishing rod complete with a hook on the end). As with many dep sea fish, they can often swallow prey their own size or bigger. This all applies to the female anglerfish only, though. The male is much smaller, and in many species lacks the ability to even feed itself when it reaches adulthood. It has a very good sense of sight or small, though, allowing it to hopefully track down a female and mate before dying. Such extreme sexual dimorphism is very common with deep sea fish. Famously, certain genuses of anglerfish have what is called parasitic mating, where the male bites into the female and generates an enzyme that causes his body to fuse together with her. The attached male gains nutrition from the female's bloodstream, and over time will atrophy to the point of becoming little more than a pair of testicles attached to the female. Some species may have multiple males attached to one female, while some have never been observed with more than one.
Blake Johnson
Yes, deep sea horror fish! I'm monitoring this thread.
William White
A highly unusual Stomiiformid, the stoplight loosejaw is intresting in a number of ways. Remember the part about most deep sea fish being unable to see red? Well, here's the exception. The stoplight loosejaw can not only see red, but also generate red light (something extremely rare in the animal kingdom; aside from the stoplight loosejaw and some closely related fish, the only other animal I can think of that does it is the larvae of certain beetle species). The red photophores are located right behind the eyes of the fish, allowing it to illuminate its field of vision without giving away its location to predator or prey. The red photophores are also where the "stoplight" part of the name comes from. The "loosejaw" part comes from the lowe jaw of the fish being able to spring forward to impale prey. The jaw even lack a floor to provide less resistance to water, allowing it to spring forward at maximum speed. Bizarrely, the majority of the loosejaw's diet consists of small copeods (it actually needs to eat them to get the pigment it needs to produce the red light), which raises the question of how it manages to eat them when it has a large hole at the bottom of its mouth.
Kevin Russell
At least somebody is here. I've usually gotten a decent audience, but it seems rather quiet now. Maybe I should switch to posting pictures of deep sea mermaids? People seem to like those. However, I'll want to first finish introducing the last few of my favorites.
The black swallower, aka. the horrible vore-fish, is probably the posterchild for why we call the deep sea underwater vore hell. It's a relatively plain-looking fish (by deep sea standards, so it still has a black scaleless skin and large pointy teeth, but at least it's roughly fish-shaped), actually related to the common perch (which I consider pretty much the most standard of all fish, considering how common it is where I live). However, it pretty much takes the common deep sea adaption of being able to eat things bigger than themsleves to the extreme. The black swallower has been often found with fish twice its own size and ten times is own weight in its stomach (the record is a snake macrel four times its own length, but that appears to have been too much as the head of the prey had burst through the stomach). In fact, most specimens of the fish have been collected as the result of it swallowing a prey so large that it was unable to digest it before it started rotting, and the gasses generated by decomposition lifted the fish to the surface like some really grotesque balloon. It's assumed the black swallower will bite onto the tail of its prey, then move its jaws to "walk" itself along the body until finally reaching the head. It is fortunate they're small (about 25 cm long) and live in deep waters, as I feel that would be a rather horrible way to die.
Xavier Sullivan
Don't worry, we're here watching in abject terror each time a new image comes up. Good thread OP
Camden Thomas
I'm learning so much! It's true. I don't even need other boards anymore.
Evan Rivera
This.
Owen Clark
I'll finish for now with one of my personal favorite animals, the noble and magnificent gulper eel. The order Saccopharyngiformes consists of gulper eels, pelican eels, and onejaws, as well as the much more normal bobtail eels (which are somewhat more distantly related to the other three). They're not "true" eels but are related to them, unlike some other fish called eels (most notably electric eels which are actually very large knifefish). These fish are essentially what happens when evolution takes a fish and starts removing every unnecessary accessory, unnecessary in this case being defined as not directly related to eating. They have no ribs, no scales, no swim bladder, a few fins, and a simpler muscle fiber structure than any other fish (they also posess a variant of one gene that's unique to them in all of the animal kingdom, for some reason). Theyr'e little more than big mouths that swim around engulfing whatever they come across.
According to a paper I've read on trophic niches of deep sea fish, the gulper eel is somewhat of a rarity in being a pure generalist. While no deep sea fish can afford to be picky with what it eats, they still have adapted primarily to some speficis food source. The balck swallower, for example, is evolved to eat relatively large bony fish, while the pelican eel, a relative of the gulper eel, has a large mouth but no teeth and a non-elastic stomach, making it suited to eating small fish and invertebrates, which it probably preys on by using its mought like a fishing net to catch many small animals at once. The pelican eel, on the other hand, seems to have evolved more for being pretty good at eating just about anything. Like the pelican eel it has a huge mouth that would let it catch many small animals at once, but it also has multiple rows of sharp teeth (even if they're small by deep sea fish standards) and a very large an elastic stomach, allowing it to also swallow large prey.
Andrew Lee
I love biology dumps on Veeky Forums
Easton Carter
Gulper- and pelican eels have a luminous organ at the end of their tail, which is though to be used to attract prey, although it's never been confirmed. It's also assumed that like regular eels they mate only once before dying. Pic is an anatomical cross-section of a gulper eel from an actual scientific paper. Nice to know actual marine biologists can be worse at drawing that I am.
The onejaw is also a relative of the gulper eel that's worth mentioning given how bizarre it is. Like the name implies, it has only one jaw. All the bones in the upper jaw have been lost, leaving a single tooth directly attached to the braincase. The tooth is also venomous, because it just wouldn't be weird enough otherwise. It's assume the fish rams its prey with the venomous tooth to kill or paralyse it. Very little is known about these fish, as they are rarely seen and are some of the most deepest-living fishes known. To quote an actual marine biologist on thematter: "Beyond this we know nothing about the biology of monognathids; indeed, their odd morphology and their near total lack of sense organs make it difficult to imagine how they function and survive in their environment."
Eli Sullivan
Should I keep posting more actual fish, or switch to horrible deep sea mermaids? I'm getting a bit tired of writing long posts, but I could just dump more pictures of the various fish I've mentioned.
Chase Bell
Yeah, mermaids, please, OP. And thanks for all the knowledge you're sharing.
Andrew Morgan
The last couple of comics I've drawn I haven't really got a good place to post, as the thread I started drawing them for fell off the board before I was done. I had to post them in a random drawthread.
Matthew Gonzalez
This is the latest one I've drawn so far. I should do some more, but it takes quite a bit of time and I need to get a good idea about what to draw, too.
I'm starting to think gulper eel is my favorite horrible deep sea mermaid. She's a cute, even if she is dumber than a bag of hammers.
Landon Fisher
Well, this just reminds me I gotta get back to writing that story of deep sea adventure.
William Mitchell
...Although it seems a lot of people like black swallower the best. Gee, I can't imagine why...
Hudson Cook
I should posts non-horribly drawn deep sea mermaids as well.
Carson Moore
...
Leo Scott
...
Henry Fisher
...
Isaac Watson
...
Chase Garcia
...
Mason Wilson
...
Joshua Taylor
I like that somebody actually drew fanart of the horrible deep sea mermaids.
Gabriel Watson
This was one of the first comics I did, and one of the ones people seem to like the most.
Liam Brooks
For this one I drew the mermaids roughly in scale with the fish they're based on (which is why anglerfish is so small, as the particular species I sort-of based her on is quite small; anglerfish come in quite a variety of sizes, with the largest being around 1,6 m long).
Carson Wilson
Wooo! Time for the scariest thread on Veeky Forums!
Jayden Smith
...
Jackson Thompson
...
Leo Barnes
Switching back to actual fish for a while.
The marine hatchetfish is another midwater fish, with an extremely laterally compressed body to minimise the silhouette when viewed from below, and upward-pointing eyes and mouth. It's well known from looking like some kind of damned soul screaming in agony when viewed directly from the front, but from the side it looks relatively normal.
Nathan Cook
Male anglerfish.
Brayden Barnes
...
Bentley Sanchez
...
Christian Williams
...
Connor Lee
>From the side looks relatively normal.
Nope still looks like something out of H R Geiger's nightmares.
Asher Butler
Based on that picture, I'm going to call that the Deadlights fish.
Jason Rodriguez
The fangtooth, also known as ogrefish, has the largest teeth relative to body size on any animal. It also appears to be a relative newcomer to the deep sea, with its closest relative being shallow-water fish and it not having quite all the standard deep sea adaptions. For one it has scales, albeit very small ones, and it has stronger muscles, allowing for a more agressive hunting style. They're also extremely tough for deep sea fish standards, as they have survived in captivity for weeks (most deep sea fish die in a few hours in captivity, as it's essentially impossible to maintain their natural environment in captivity).
Adrian Adams
A swimming polychete worm.
Jaxson Foster
X-ray of a gulper eel, showing the rather bizarre skull structure, with a tiny braincase and long and spindly jawbones that extend way past the head.
Isaiah Torres
While most deep sea fish are small, the goblin shark can actually grow up to 6 m long. It is notable for having a long "nose" with large amount of electricity receptors, and extensible jaws with wicked hook-like teeth, that can shoot forward to capture prey.
Caleb Hughes
...
Nathan Davis
The flabby whalefish is another example of extreme dimorphism among deep sea fish, as the male, female, and larval stage of the fish were only recognised to be the same species in 2009. The larval form of the fish has a long tail and lives in shallow water, eating copepods. The male has a highly developed sense of smell, but its mouth is fused shut. It survives by metabolising the shells of prey it ate as a larvae, seeking to find a female before it runs out and starves to death. The female on the other hand is a large bright red fish with a huge mouth, tiny vestigial eyes, and very well-developed lateral line pores for sensing changes in water pressure and detecting vibrations. Aside from a huge mouth, the gill-arches of the fish are also specialised to effectively work as mouths, allowing it to suck in prey using three orifices at once.
Connor Parker
Larvae of some dragonfish have long eyestalks. The stalks actually curl into its eyesockets as it matures, and are actually still present behind the eyes of the adult fish.
Easton Perry
The slender snipe eels is an extremely long and thin eel, only weighting only a few ounce despite being up to 5 ft long. Their jaws are filled with large amounts of tiny teeth, and curve apart from each other. They also have the largest amout of vertebrae on any animal, and apparently their body gets so slender they can't actually fit their intestines to their rear, and instead it does an u-turn and the fish's anus is located on its throat.
Jason Price
>the gill-arches of the fish are also specialised to effectively work as mouths
Jesus, you're not kidding about the vore dimension thing, are you?
Jaxson Green
...
Chase Reed
The amount of fish being able to swallow things bigger than themselves should be proof enough.
Charles Martinez
I remember many moons ago you had a few posts about whale carcasses...
Bentley Scott
>this whole thread >those oencil drawings in particular
Elijah Lewis
Whale falls (the technical term for whale carcasses on the deep sea floor) are quite intresting. They're pretty much oasises on the otherwise barren abyssal plains, sustaining scavengers from sharks to hagfish, giant isopods, and species of worms evolved solely to eat whalebone. A whalefall may sustain smaller animals for decades. The meats gets usually eaten within a few years, but the bones will remain far longer, and it may be centuries before they are completely broken down by bacteria.
Juan Lewis
I'd let a cute mermaid eat me.
Daniel Collins
Does the oceanic floor also count as a deep layer of this vore dimension, or is it a different kind of hell?
Oliver Myers
I think that was labeled Cthuluhworld. Or maybe that was just the abyss plain.
Christian Hill
Cookicutter shark is a small shark with very large teeth and jaws evolved for biting into large animals like whales, and tearing chunks from them. Some species use bioluminescens to attract large animals to them. The cookiecutter shark is notable for being the most damaging deep sea fish to humans, considering it has more than once bitten a hole in the soft plastic covering of the radar equipment of nuclear submarines, forcing a billion-dollar piece of military hardware with enough firepower to wipe out nations to return to dock to get the component fixed.
Sebastian Gomez
>LaughingSharkGirls.gif
Jack Flores
Thought that was scary town
Parker Perry
...
Mason Martinez
It's quite different. The fish tend to be larger and have stronger muscles, but lack horrible vore abilities. There's a stable supply of food in form of bottom-dwelling invertebrates and constant fall of marine snow (remains of dead biomatter falling from shallower depths), even if it's not particularly nutritious, plus occasional larger carcass, so adaptions are more geared towards detecting food and swimming to it, rather than eating whatever happens to bump into you.
Xavier Edwards
Herds of abyssal sea cucumbers graze the ooze of the abyssal plain. How magnificent.
Anthony Phillips
...
Jose Wood
Fascinating, benthic horrors are.
I guess hydrothermal vents have more in common with the coral reefs above than with the hungry, dark void.
Robert Green
Deep sea vents are another hotspot for life in the ocean floor, being home to the famous giant tubeworms, as well as various other invertebrates and fish that feed on the tubeworms, mussels, and bacteria found around the vents. Amazingly, a species of flounder has been founding hanging around, and on, boiling hot sulphur seeps near the vents. Seemingly indifferent to the toxic conditions around them, they feed on fish that pass over the vents and die from poisoning or are boiled alive. Aside from many individuals having minor deformities, they seem to do fine, and can have very high population density relative standard for the ocean floor.
Dylan Stewart
This is really cute, OP!
> I need to get a good idea about what to draw Yes! That's how you do it, man. Like nedroid. Only make a comic you know will be good.
Carson Martinez
If coral reefs vented poisonous superheated liquid, yes. They can sustain a high amount of organisms that live in symbiosis with sulfur-breathing bacteria, though, and other creatures that feed on those.
Hydrothermal vetns also tie in to my actual degree in economic geology, as they are the source of vulcanically-hosted massive suplhide deposits which I wrote my thesis on. The ore deposits are simply old vent fields, now emplaced onto continental crust after subduction. The water erupting from the vents is rich in copper, lead, silver, and other minerals the superheated liquid dissolves from the ocean crust, which get deposited on the area the water emerges from (forming the "chimneys" themselves), or distal from them.
Thomas Nelson
...
Brody Smith
The scaly-footed gastropod lives around hydrothermal vents, and incorporates iron sulfide to its shell and scales covering its foot. No other animal does this, and it has actually been investigated by engineers and the military. Presumably to create new composite materials and armor, not genetically engineer giant armored snail-tanks.
Carson Ortiz
...
Jaxon Cruz
A perverse island of life in the sunless depths, subsisting on the infernal brimstone of the abyss instead of the light of the heavens.
Angel Sanders
I work with someone who did his thesis on these snails. The mechanism by which they grow their armor is fascinating even if I followed one word in four.
Samuel Torres
Can it even retract to its shell with scales like that? Or does it even need to?
Benjamin Adams
>goblin shark I don't think I have ever seen an animal quite as pathetic-looking
That thing's eyes are just plainly begging for death
Evan Murphy
I presume the scales cover the foot so it doesn't have to retract. It can probably retract partly to its shell, leaving only the scales exposed.
Colton Hughes
Fuck these guys. Only saving grace is that they bite dolphins and fuck dolphins
John Hernandez
I wonder if this is actually more common in the abyss, it's just that this environment is less explored than the surface of Mars.
Jose Gray
>genetically engineered giant armored snail-tanks Fuck if that isn't going in my setting now, underwater vore hell is hands down best setting.
John Morris
The frileld shark is probably the most primitive kind of shark alive today. It has an eel-like body, jaws at the end of its snout (not under like most sharks), open lateral line, long gill-slits with frill-liked gill filaments, and very odd-looking arrangement of needle-like teeth. Fossils of similar shark are found at the end of the Cretaciosu period, where they apparently lived in much shallower waters. Nowdays they're usually foud at depths of 50 m or more, and sometimes over 1 km deep. It can bend and contort its body a lot more than a typical shark, and catches prey by lunging forward like a snake. It primarily feeds on squids, but also eats fish, and can swallow prey over half its own size (the shark is about 2 m long). It's also ovoviviparious like some other sharks, i.e. it techically has eggs, but the eggs hatch inside the mother's body. It takes 3,5 years for the baby to be actually born, giving it the longest gestation period on any vertebrate.
Kayden Bell
I'll have to be going now. If the thread is up tomorrow, I'll continue posting stuff. And I might draw more horrible deep sea mermaids, especially if somebody has a good suggestion for what to draw.
Jack King
It's amazing how nature still keeps its lost toys around, stashed into the dark corners of Earth.
Ayden Gutierrez
... and here I'd alway thought crinoids were nearly static, like anemones and barnacles.
All this stuff is amazing.
John Allen
Unless we destroy them, they will destroy us.
Nolan Davis
...
Daniel Nguyen
These aren't deep sea, but I appreciate your thread and they're all I have.
Parker Gutierrez
Boop
Isaac Edwards
...
Tyler Miller
...
Michael Green
>want to play Subnautica, because submarines and shit >don't want to play Subnautica because deep sea nope.jpg
Austin Torres
...
Ryan Wright
DOOK
Chase Sanders
Speaking.of, they eventually figured out what the bloop was right? It was an iceberg or something, right?
