Rare Sea Creature Washes Ashore

Rare Salmon Has Huge Head, Eyes
A rarely seen marine animal recently washed up on a Washington state beach.

john

www.nbc4.tv...

How bizarre! You won't see that on the menu at Red Lobster.

This is really an odd thing, one of my friends is majoring in marine biology and she says that deep water fish usually don't just wash up on land.

The deep water biome is one of the least understood in the world, it's also one of the very few biomes where most life is carnivorous. Usually if a fish died in the deep water, it would be quickly eaten by other creatures in very short order. Also the pressue is greater at lower depths and fish have smaller air bladders, so they would probably sink instead of floating to the top, although this is not completely understood.

If this becomes more than just an isolated occourance, it could mean that there are changes going on in the deep water off of the Pacific Coast, although anything from pollution to plate shifts could cause changes and unpredicted changes in a biome that we know vurtually nothing about.

The reason the fish has such large eyes is that it actually uses sight to hunt for prey, in an environment with little natural light, a creature needs very large and sensitive eyesight to work effectively.

~Astral

It may be rare, but not unheard of for deep see life to wash a shore. Case and point, the giant squid.

[edit on 16-6-2004 by mrmonsoon]

fishbase.org...

More info on the fish.

Reference the Biology section from Fishbase:

[Emphasis added]

Biology: Oceanic (Ref. 2850). Also found near shore, but large adults sometimes feed on the bottom (Ref. 2850). Small individuals feed on copepods, annelid worms, and fish larvae; larger individuals feed on copepods, euphausiids, small pelagic fishes, young rockfishes, squid, and Octopoda (Ref. 6885). Oviparous, with planktonic eggs and larvae (Ref. 36610).

well that beast looks like something you would find in the abyssal plain like the viperfish and dragonfish.