Oceanographers watching the live video nicknamed the animals “Zappa fish” because of what seemed to be a long, beardlike barb coming off their chin. Jason, a remotely operated vehicle servicing ocean-bottom instruments at the Hawaii-2 Observatory in the Pacific Ocean, was capturing the pictures as the bizarre fish hovered just above the seafloor at a depth of about 5,000 meters.
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The images, which researchers from the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution posted on the Internet 3 years ago but couldn’t identify, stand as the first video recordings of any deep-sea anglerfish. What’s more, the pictures overturn long-held notions of how some anglerfish behave. “I was astounded to see the fish swimming upside down,” says deep-sea biologist Jon A. Moore of the Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter. The barb actually extends from its nose.