If that’s not creepy, I don’t know what is.
When I was a kid, I used to read stories about Jaques Cousteau. I’d build cardboard submarines in our backyard in the summertime, pull a black toque (I grew up in Canada, where a beanie is a goofy hat with a propeller on top) on my head, and imagine I was an intrepid explorer encased in a metal sphere, seeing things no one else had ever seen. I was destined for exploring.
All that just changed. I didn’t realize that Predator lived under the sea. Now I want nothing to do with it. In fact, I’m moving to Idaho, where the only thing I have to be worried about is potato fights.
The reason for my change of heart? The Deep Sea Dragon Fish, the most horrifying six inches of terror you’ve ever seen. Cousteau actually leapt from his submarine at 2000 feet down and swam for the surface when he first saw one. No one knows how he survived – it’s one of history’s great mysteries. Nah, I just made that up. And while it’s only around six inches long and poses no threat to humans (mostly because there’s no way in hell we’re swimming around where it lives), it’s still a pretty amazing testament to evolution’s strangeness. Or God’s wacky paintbrush. Either way, it’s weird.
Also known as the scaleless dragonfish, the toothy torch-bearer is just one of many species of deep sea fish that has evolved to produce its own light. The Blind Mole was too lazy to do that, so it just grew skin over its eyes and called it a day, constantly running into things and swearing in Mole-inese through a mouthful of dirt. Deep sea dragonfish hold their lantern, known as a photophore, on a barbel that hangs off its chin. Through a process called bioluminescence, it lights up the darkest depths of the sea like a lighter at a KISS concert. There seems to be a number of different uses for the lantern, including attracting and disorienting prey and attracting a mate.
You probably noticed, but the dragonfish has enormous teeth for its body size. Once its prey comes in for a closer look at the weird light at 2000 feet below the surface, our guy eats it with little to no concern about what it is. It could be a floating turnip, and he’d snap at it. He’d spit it out, because turnips are disgusting, but he’d still do it. Here’s the crazy part: the dragonfish has a stomach with black inner walls, because a lot of its prey emits light themselves. Once it’s in the belly of the beast, it’s basically in a black hole, never to shine its light into the briny depths again.
There’s a lot of information on these creatures, and most of it contradicts itself – probably due to the fact that it lives so deep beneath the sea and we just can’t gather that much information about it. Its habitat is anywhere from 1000 to 5000 feet, although the eggs are buoyant. They’re born on the surface, where they fend for themselves until they eventually grow their chin-lantern, then they spend the rest of their lives in the deep sea, creeping out anything and everything they come in contact with.
