Faceless fish among weird deep sea Australian finds

May 31, 2017

Faceless fish and other weird and wonderful creatures, many of them new species, have been hauled up from the deep waters off Australia during a scientific voyage studying parts of the ocean never explored before.

The month-long journey off the country's eastern seaboard has been surveying life lurking in a dark and cold abyss that plunges four kilometres (2.5 miles) below the surface, using nets, sonar and deep-sea cameras.

Chief scientist on board "The Investigator" Tim O'Hara from Museums Victoria told AFP Wednesday the search area was "the most unexplored environment on earth".

Bright red spiky rock crabs, puffed-up coffinfish, blind sea spiders and deep sea eels have been collected since the scientists began their voyage—from Launceston in Tasmania north towards the Coral Sea—on May 15.

They also came across an unusual faceless fish, which has only been recorded once before by the pioneering scientific crew of HMS Challenger off Papua New Guinea in 1873.

"It hasn't got any eyes or a visible nose and it's mouth is underneath," O'Hara said from the ship.

At such huge depths, it is so dark that creatures often have no eyes or produce their own light through bioluminescence, he added.

Another find was carnivorous sponges that wield lethal spicules made of silicon, effectively glass. They get small crustaceans hooked on their Velcro-like spines, to be slowly digested in-situ.

This technique differs from most deep-sea sponges, which feed on bacteria and other single-celled organisms filtered from passing currents.

"We've got 27 scientists on board who are leaders in their fields and they tell me that around one-third of what we've found are new species," said O'Hara, with several thousand specimens so far retrieved and two weeks of the trip still to go.

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