“I don’t think people have any concept of how little we understand life on our own planet,” she says.īut in order to understand that life better - at least in the ocean - she would need to create the equivalent of a blind for the ocean. This was why Widder wanted the chance to observe ocean animals like the gulper eel, or sixgill sharks, or even the extremely elusive giant squid, without them noticing her presence. “It just leaves you with so many questions when you see an animal like this,” Widder says.
Ocean biologist Edith Widder, early in her career as a marine explorer, in a diving suit known as a WASP. Animals that might normally swim around would just float at the top of tanks and generally act like they were in a glass cage, thousands of miles away from home.
Over the course of her decades-long career, when Widder captured animals from the deep ocean and brought them into laboratory aquariums for study, the ocean animals would sometimes start behaving weirdly. Studying fish in labs is also not a perfect solution. And so, Widder suspected that there were lots of great scientific insights and lessons of natural history, all being left unlearned.
“When we go down there with our big, noisy thrusters and bright white lights.” She says the fish and other animals are disturbed by the noise and the vibrations, so even if they don’t swim away, they won’t necessarily act naturally. “We’re just so obtrusive,” Widder says, when she describes the options that are most readily available to a marine biologist, like observing sea creatures aboard a submarine. But for a long time, Widder couldn’t conceal herself enough to glean these kinds of details from underwater research subjects. Undisturbed, animals will reveal amazing secrets: mating rituals, hunting habits, or special behaviors that help them avoid predators. On land, if scientists want to observe animals in their natural habitat, undisturbed, they can set up special concealment spots, or “blinds,” that hide their presence from their subjects. Snailfish live in the deepest part of the ocean, known as the hadal zone, where depths reach 6,000 to 11,000 meters and no light penetrates, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.Marine biologist Edith Widder loves the ocean, but there is one thing she envies about her colleagues who study life on land. The previous deepest recorded fish in the Mariana Trench was identified as a Mariana snailfish, which had been known to scientists since 2014, Insider reported at the time. "We have spent over 15 years researching these deep snailfish there is so much more to them than simply the depth, but the maximum depth they can survive is truly astonishing," Jamieson, chief scientist of the expedition, said in a statement. The mission is part of a multi-year into the deepest fish populations in the world - and the discovery was part of a collaboration between the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre and a team from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. Instead, the researchers trapped several fish slightly higher up in the water at 8,022 meters, which were identified as Pseudoliparis belyaevi, and set the record for the deepest fish ever caught. It was a juvenile of unknown snailfish species of the genus Pseudoliparis, however, scientists did not capture a specimen to fully identify the species, according the university. University of Western Australia/ Caladan Oceanic These two specimens are the deepest fish ever caught, recovered from a depth of 8022 meter in the Japan Trench, experts said. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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