The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California recently found a rare "alien fish" in the 600-meter deep sea, which has a translucent head and exposes two large green eyes.
The deep-sea "alien fish" has a translucent head with two large green eyes inside.
The monster fish was reportedly discovered last week by an MBARI expedition 600 meters underwater in Monterey Bay off the Coast of California, but it was first described in 1939 as the barreley fish.
The video released by the expedition said that MBARI's remotely controlled submersible Ventana and Doc Ricketts have successfully divened more than 5,600 times, recording more than 27,600 hours of video, but have only encountered 9 "barley fish".
The video shows that the barley fish's eyes look like only two small depressions, but its eyeballs are two large glowing green balls hidden deep in the translucent head, which can be gazed overhead.
Eyeballs are in this position and allow the barley fish to scan the waters above it in search of food. Living in such a deep place, food is scarce. At the same time, barley fish can also make the eyeballs roll forward.
According to evolutionary biologists, barley fish develop such powerful vision because it lives in a harsh environment with no sunlight to shine.
Its eyes are called "tubular eyes," which are typical of deep-sea creatures and consist of a multilayered retina and a large lens, which allows them to detect the maximum amount of light in one direction.
In 2019, a new study showed that the fish's unusual eyes could rotate within the transparent "shield" that covers its head, allowing it to "raise its eyes" to look for food and look forward to what it is eating.
Marine biologists have also found that barley fish use their large, flat fins to stay still in the water. Because the barley fish's body is mostly dark, the surrounding creatures cannot see it clearly, nor can the predators lurking above it, but it can look upwards to hunt the small fish and plankton on which it depends.
When it finds the right food, the barley fish attacks from the darkness and quickly devours its prey.
When entering shallower waters, barley fish's eyes can turn to avoid looking at the sun.
The barley fish's amazing eyeballs glow bright green, and researchers think it may have evolved a "filter" that allowed it to ignore sunlight and instead spot biofluorescence of small fish and jellyfish.
Text/Nandu reporter Chen Lin