Ted Pietsch News Today

Far below the ocean's surface, in the dark depths of the deep sea floor ecosystem (about 3,000 feet or 1,000 meters deep), exists an entire world of deep sea creatures that humans rarely glimpse.

Far below the ocean's surface, in the dark depths of the deep sea floor ecosystem (about 3,000 feet or 1,000 meters deep), exists an entire world of deep sea creatures that humans rarely glimpse.

Most species of the rarely seen anglerfish live up to a mile beneath the ocean, where the females lure prey with a head-dangling hook appendage and permanently fuse with male suitors.

Most people learn about "the birds and the bees" when theyre young, but sex in the animal kingdom is not for the faint of heart.

A deep trawl has brought up a potentially new species of a fish whose extreme mating methods include permanent physical fusion

It's the fish that fishes other fish -- and it's pretty amazing at the job!

In 1833, an almost perfectly spherical fish washed ashore in Greenland and was taken to zoologist Johannes Christopher Hagemann Reinhardt in Copenhagen, Denmark. This fish — later known as the footballfish, Himantolophus groenlandicus, or the man-gobbler — was the first anglerfish known to science, wrote Ted Pietsch, a systematist and evolutionary biologist, in his book “ Oceanic Anglerfishes” (University of California Press, 2009).  Today, there are about 170 known species in 12 fami...

Link Copied In my personal opinion, the greatest coming-of-age story on Earth does not take place in a Dickens novel or a Disney movie, but rather in a white fish at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The fish in question, called a zoarcid, looks like a creature caught in an identity crisis, too long to be a fish but too short to be an eel, its lips permanently drooping in a sullen pout. Otherwise, the fish has no real reason to be grumpy. It lives in one of the cushiest parts of the deep sea, in...