Deep dive 3 min read
Blobfish in Water vs. Out of Water: What It Really Looks Like
The saddest face on the internet is a lie. Here's what a blobfish really looks like at home in the deep sea, and what turns it into a pink puddle.
You know the face. Droopy pink skin, a sad lump of a nose and a mouth that looks permanently disappointed. The blobfish is a meme, a mascot and the winner of an official “world’s ugliest animal” vote. There’s just one problem: that’s not what a blobfish looks like. Not at home, anyway.
The blobfish you know is a victim
Every famous blobfish photo shows an animal that has been dragged up from the deep sea in a fishing net. That trip is brutal. The blobfish lives roughly 600 to 1,200 metres down, where the water pressure is around 60 to 120 times higher than at the surface. Its body is built for that crushing weight, not for the deck of a boat.
When it’s pulled up quickly, the pressure drops, its soft tissues expand and sag, and the net scrapes its delicate skin. What lands on deck is a collapsed, damaged fish. Calling that its “real face” is like judging a person by a photo taken after they fell out of an aeroplane.
What a blobfish looks like in water
At home, a blobfish looks surprisingly normal. Think of a slightly chubby, tadpole-shaped fish with a big head, small fins and a tapering tail. Its body is firm enough to hold a clear fish shape, its skin is smooth, and its face has a mildly grumpy expression rather than a melting one. Footage from deep-sea cameras shows it hovering calmly just above the sea floor.
In the deep sea, the blobfish looks like a fish. On land, it looks like a melted candle.
Why it’s made of jelly
The blobfish has very little muscle and soft, light bones. Most of its body is a gelatinous mass that is slightly less dense than water. That’s the clever part: instead of burning energy to swim, it simply floats just above the bottom without effort.
Food is scarce in the deep, so saving energy is everything. The blobfish barely moves and eats whatever drifts or crawls past its mouth: small crabs, sea urchins, shellfish and other soft snacks. It’s less of a hunter and more of a very patient vacuum cleaner.
Strange but trueThe most famous blobfish photo shows a fish nicknamed “Mr Blobby”. It was caught off New Zealand in 2003 and is still preserved in a jar at the Australian Museum in Sydney.
Where blobfish live
Blobfish live in the deep waters off south-eastern Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. They grow to about 30 cm long. Nobody has ever counted them, because almost nobody goes down there. The biggest danger to them is deep-sea trawling: they’re not the target, but they get swept up in nets meant for other fish.
Is the blobfish really the ugliest animal?
In 2013, the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, a tongue-in-cheek campaign to get people to care about less cuddly species, crowned the blobfish the world’s ugliest animal. It worked: the blobfish became famous almost overnight.
But now you know the truth. The ugliest animal in the world is only ugly in the wrong place. Leave it in the deep sea and it’s a perfectly respectable fish, just with a very unlucky photo shoot. Want more creatures that look unreal? Check out our ugliest animals and deep-sea collections.
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