Blobfish Look Normal at Depth

The gelatinous, sad-faced creature often crowned the "world's ugliest animal" is a deeply misleading caricature. This famous image is not what the blobfish looks like in its home, but rather the result of catastrophic tissue damage. Living at depths of 2,000 to 4,000 feet off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, the blobfish is subjected to water pressure more than 100 times greater than at the surface. This immense, crushing force is precisely what holds its body together, giving it the unremarkable appearance of a typical, tadpole-like fish with a slightly bulbous head.

The blobfish’s unique body is a brilliant deep-sea adaptation. Instead of a gas-filled swim bladder for buoyancy, which would be crushed by the extreme pressure, it has a gelatinous body that is slightly less dense than the surrounding water. This allows it to float just above the seafloor without expending precious energy, waiting for small crustaceans to drift by. When a blobfish is violently dragged to the surface by deep-sea fishing trawlers, this delicate pressure balance is destroyed. The rapid decompression causes its tissues to expand and collapse into the shapeless, droopy form seen in photographs, a tragic consequence of extreme barotrauma.