WASHINGTON — An eerie deep-sea creature made a surprising appearance near the ocean’s surface last week.
Condrik Tenerife, a shark ocean research organization, spotted a humpback anglerfish while the team was conducting research on pelagic sharks off the coast of Spain’s Canary Islands.
According to the Australian Museum, the humpback anglerfish is commonly found at mesopelagic depths, between 200 and 1000 meters below the ocean surface. The anglerfish is also known as the black seadevil or black sea monster.
The specific humpback anglerfish was a female Melanocetus johnsonii as noted by the unique bioluminescent lure that extends from their head, according to Oceana. Only female have this dorsal lure which contains light-producing bacteria and helps them hunt.
Male anglerfish are very small and lack the lighted lures.
The rare sighting was captured in a video by marine wildlife photographer David Jara Boguñá.
“It could be the first recorded sighting in the world of an adult black devil or abyssal anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii) alive, in broad daylight and on the surface,” Boguñá wrote in an Instagram post translated from Spanish. “This surprising find did not leave the crew indifferent and will be remembered forever.”
A living humpback angelfish has never been recorded so close to the surface, with Boguñá noting that “existing records to date correspond to larvae, dead adult specimens or recorded with submarines.”
It’s currently unclear why the fish was swimming so close to the surface, but Laia Valor, one of the researchers, told Spanish news outlet EFE, it died a few hours after they found it.
“We don’t have anything clear, but it’s not normal. It’s a very isolated and sporadic sighting. We can’t say that it never happens, although if it happened on a larger scale these sightings would occur more often, but we can say that it could be the first time it has been recorded like this,” Valor said.