10 Unbelievable Details Surrounding The Blobfish

6 /10 No Swimmer

Since blobfish has no swim bladder, it is unable to obtain or maintain buoyancy. Instead of swimming, it glides along in the water or the seafloor.

Think of the movement as oil floating on water. The only buoyancy it gets is from the fatty body composition. Many people call the blobfish lazy because it doesn’t move anywhere that often.

Most of the time, it occupies the same spot motionless to conserve energy. Blobfish cannot be agile anyway as it has little muscle. In a way, it is indeed fat and lazy.

5 /10 Survival Strategy

Watt added that for the blobfish, what seems to be some handicap are, in reality, parts of survival strategy.

Being fat makes up for the lack of swim bladder, while the inherent laziness helps save precious energy.

Neutral buoyancy allows them to move anywhere the water takes them.

With such a lethargy, blobfish has no option but to eat almost all tiny creatures that float in front of its mouths, such as sea snails, small crustaceans, or any other edible matter.

This hunting behavior is similar to those of other deep-sea predators.

4 /10 Wide Range Of Habitat

Not much is known about blobfish behaviors, and the same can be said for just about every deep-sea creature. The whole Psychrolutidae family is found anywhere across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

However, the Psychrolutes microporous live mainly in the waters between New Zealand and Australia at depths greater than 1,600 feet.

They live in the dark layers of the ocean, making research and studies of their behavior in the wild next to impossible.

Marine biologists also have no idea how blobfish mate. The best guess is that a pair will cling to each other for the deed.

3 /10 Conservation Status

No one can say for sure whether or not the blobfish is endangered. There has never been any study about their numbers in the wild and conservation status.

We don’t even know if they have natural predators. Mapping the territory of a fish (any fish) is quite complex, let alone the deep-sea kind.

The question about the impacts of ocean acidification on blobfish remains unanswered.

Of course, the specimen obtained thus far were all dead or dying at the surface, so how long blobfish can live in the wild is anybody’s guess at this point.

2 /10 Unlikely High In Number

Assuming Psychrolutes microporous is limited to the waters between and around New Zealand and Australia, Watt reckons their number is likely relatively small. Thankfully there is not a lot of trawlers working in the region as well.

For every blobfish that was accidentally caught in the fishing net, it is uncertain what kind of damage it does to the ecosystem down under.

If other species are used for comparison, blobfish should live relatively long, like many other deep-sea creatures. Take the orange roughy, for example, a deep-sea fish that can reach maturity at around 30 years of age.

1 /10 A Mystery Fish

Apart from what scientists have revealed from the limited number of specimens so far, blobfish is a mystery. There is not much we know about the fish, and scientists are not likely to learn something new anytime soon.

A research expedition to the depth of the ocean would likely be an expensive endeavor; there can be some in the future, but it is reasonable to doubt if any would focus on blobfish.

On the other hand, the deep-sea environment can benefit the species in the long run; the thousands-of-feet separation from the surface is a savior for them.