The Blobfish, while it’s pink and bald and squished, has no loving mum to wipe its mouth, leaving it in a state of perpetual deep-sea sadness.
When I was born, I was very pink. I had a birthmark on my head (which has since faded) that made me look even pinker. And of course, I was bald. My nose was kind of squished from being violently expelled from the dark warmth of my nine-month home, and my eyes were squeezed tightly shut. But my mum loved me, despite all that. Eventually, I started to smile and play and turned into a relatively normal looking human (if devastatingly handsome can be called normal). Of course, for the first few years I shit in my pants and had to be spoon fed, but I had a mother who wiped my both my butt and the food from my mouth. The Blobfish, while it’s pink and bald and squished, has no loving mum to wipe its mouth, leaving it in a state of perpetual deep-sea sadness, where smiling and playing is impossible.
If the Blobfish didn’t disgust me so much, I’d want to hug it and make it feel better. But since it’s basically a vile, slimy pile of awfulness, I don’t want to hug it. I want to run from it. Lucky for me, it lives far away. Incredibly far, actually. Blobfish, either in an effort to hide their good looks from the media or as an effect of evolution, live mainly at incredible depths: around 3000 ft. As Xzibit would say, “Now that’s deep. How deep? It’s deeper than Atlantis. Home of the scandalous, big bad Los Angeles.” Thank God. If I were Jacques Cousteau and I ran into one of these things, I would throw my little beanie at it, climb out of my submarine, and, after imploding from the pressure, swim for the surface in a mad-panic. “DID YOU SEE THAT!?” I’d ask my shipmates on my arrival at the surface. “THAT’S THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I’VE EVER SEEN!” Of course, I’d say all this in french, but I don’t speak french and you don’t understand it, so it doesn’t matter.
The Blobfish would stay at the bottom of the sea, sadly blowing bubbles up at Jacques, wondering why everyone runs at the sight of his horrible, gum-wad body.
But there is some kind of saving grace, at least. Because of the immense pressure that it lives in, their gelatinous bodies keep at least a semblance of non-blob shape. This is because its flesh is basically pudding. The density of their pudding-body is just less than the water they live in, allowing them to be one of the laziest creatures in the world. More than me, even, and I once tried to get bedsores for three months just to see if I could. I couldn’t, by the way. I just got kind of fat. But the Blobfish has lazy on lockdown. It floats almost motionless above the sea floor, expending no energy on that silly swimming motion that fish usually do. It waits for anything edible to float in front of it, then sucks it in. Afterwards, I imagine it pants through its gills for a while, then sits on a couch and watches Judge Judy thinking about how it should really get to the gym or go for a run or something. But it never does.
But it would have to be watching an Australian version of Judge Judy, because that’s where it lives. It calls the Southern Ocean and the Tasman Sea home. And here’s a surprise: we’re killing it! By accident! The poor little sea-loogie is bordering on extinction, as far as we can tell. God, we’re awful. Granted, the Blobfish is pretty hideous, but if we killed things because they were ugly, then we’d never have the comedic stylings of Gilbert Gottfried or Jay-Z’s genius.
Since the Blobfish has almost no muscles (literally, it’s made of goo), it can’t really escape anything. Especially deep-sea trawlers, scooping everything up in its way so we can scrounge through it, pick out whatever is valuable us, and throw the rest in the dumpster, even if we happen to be throwing the last of a (disgusting) species away. But lobster is so good, isn’t it? My need for buttery crustacean flesh far outweighs the survival of a species. Oh wait. No it doesn’t.
Want to see more Crazy Creature of the Week? Check out the Coconut Crab, Nomura’s Jellyfish, the Oarfish, and the Goblin Shark. They’re all disgustingly interesting, I promise.
